You want a private get-acquainted lunch at Dreamworks with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. You want Rob Reiner to like you and write you a check and introduce you to his friends. You want Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez and a bunch of other L.A. swells to pay $2,000 apiece to hear the Eagles — yes, the Eagles — play “Hotel California” in a tent and then have dinner with you afterward.

What you really want is to be Bill Clinton.

The California primary is three months off, but the race for the hearts and minds and money of Hollywood is well underway. Howard Dean has raised more than a half a million dollars from actors, directors, musicians and others in the entertainment industry already, and latecomer Wes Clark is making up for lost time fast. Clark announced his candidacy on Sept. 17; by the close of the Federal Election Commission reporting period on Sept. 30, he had raised $105,000 from the entertainment industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and he has raised hundreds of thousands more since.

Six-figure numbers may not seem like much in the moneyed worlds of Hollywood and Washington. Since 1990, the entertainment industry has pumped more than $100 million into federal elections on behalf of Democrats — about the same amount that the oil and gas industry has given to Republicans over the same period of time. Hollywood hasn’t given anything like that kind of money to any Democrat yet this year. But it’s early in the 2004 presidential race — too early for the millions upon millions of dollars of Hollywood “soft money” that will find their way into the system regardless of how the Supreme Court rules on McCain-Feingold — and nine Democratic candidates are dividing the cash that’s already in. Once a clear front-runner emerges, and once all those relatively paltry $2,000 contributions give way to blockbuster fundraisers and a flood of “soft money,” politically active entertainers say that Hollywood will be a major force in helping Democrats try to defeat George W. Bush.

“At the end of the day, the industry will coalesce like we always do,” says Reiner, who played Archie Bunker’s son-in-law on “All in the Family” and who directed films including “When Harry Met Sally,” “Misery” and “The American President” before signing on as the co-chair of Howard Dean’s California campaign. “It’s more fractured now than it was during the Clinton era because Clinton was like a rock star. People here like stars. They thought Wesley Clark could be a movie star. They thought initially that John Edwards would be the movie star. But at the end of the day, we will coalesce.”

If Reiner’s comments sound like a not so thinly veiled stab at Wes Clark — writing him off as a has-been before he ever was, lumping him together with a never-quite-caught-fire candidate like John Edwards — well, if they sound like that, they probably are. With John Kerry’s campaign stumbling, the Hollywood primary has suddenly become a Dean-vs.-Clark matchup, with Rep. Dick Gephardt making a surprisingly strong show of fundraising as the unexciting understudy. And for all the talk about coalescing and coming together and needing — really needing — to beat Bush, the partisans backing the former Vermont governor and the retired Army general aren’t at all reticent to engage in a little intramural bashing.

Robin Williams, Helen Hunt, Rene Russo, Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Paul Newman and a host of other Hollywood types have given money to Dean. And while Clark is picking up endorsements and contributions quickly, Reiner ascribes a certain “flavor of the week” quality to his Hollywood support. Some of the people who “jumped on the Clark bandwagon,” he says, have done so “without doing their due diligence first.” He points in particular to Norman Lear, the legendary television producer who founded People for the American Way. Lear initially backed Dean — he gave $2,000 to his campaign in April — then jumped ship when Clark officially entered the race in September.

Lear is a fierce defender of First Amendment rights, and in Clark he appeared to have found a useful ally — a soldier whose sharp critiques of the Iraq War have undercut any notion that you can’t be a patriot and a protester at the same time. But Reiner said that Lear ought to feel — and is feeling — some concern after Clark said last month that he would support a constitutional amendment banning the burning of the American flag.

“I know Norman is upset about that, and he’s going to talk to Clark about it,” Reiner said. “It’s like if [pro-choice advocate] Kate Michelman supported a candidate and then found out he was pro-life. This is Norman’s big issue, First Amendment rights and freedom of speech and all that.”

Attempts to reach Lear were unsuccessful. A source close to him said that he was “disappointed” by Clark’s endorsement of the flag-burning amendment but will not withdraw his support over the issue. “He thinks Clark has the best shot at beating Bush,” the source said, “and he has his eyes on that.”

A lot of Clark’s Hollywood supporters apparently feel the same way.

Ask Hard Rock Cafe impresario Peter Morton what appeals to him about Wes Clark, and he’ll say “Everything.” Then he’ll tell you — even though you didn’t ask — why Howard Dean can’t win. “I just think that Dean will take down the Democratic Party like Dukakis did,” Morton told Salon last week. “I don’t think the American public is ready to elect a Northeastern liberal. Dean’s a good man. I respect him. But at the end of the day, I don’t think he can win.”

Morton met Clark not long before he announced his candidacy. He and Jordan Kerner, who produced “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “Inspector Gadget,” helped introduce Clark around Hollywood, putting him face to face with politically active celebrities like Lear and Steven Tisch, executive producer of the movie “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.” Last month, Morton helped Clark raise about $350,000 by hosting a benefit concert featuring the Eagles in a tent set up outside one of his restaurants.

Clark left the fundraiser a little early, reportedly to attend a much smaller dinner with Madonna. It’s not known yet whether the Material Mom will endorse Clark, but plenty of other celebrities are now on board with him. Ted Danson and his wife, activist actress Mary Steenburgen, have signed on, as has music producer Irving Azoff. And although Laurie and Larry David and Barbra Streisand have each written checks to several Democratic candidates, they’re all said to be leaning toward Clark.

“In the last six weeks, Clark has pulled together a phenomenal amount of support,” said a political advisor to several Hollywood names who are still deciding where to lend their support. “When he has met with people here, he has come across as politically very honest and straightforward. He didn’t come across like a politician. He was very comfortable in his skin and very smart. There are so many politicians who think we want them to tell us what we want to hear, and Clark wasn’t obsequious like that.”

Lara Bergthold, Clark’s political director and herself an experienced player in Hollywood fundraising, said that two things are driving support for the general among industry insiders. “One is the perception that he’s the best candidate to defeat Bush,” said Bergthold, who has done consulting work for Salon in the past. “Two is that he generates an excitement in that community that they haven’t felt with other candidates. He’s an outsider, somebody who has an unusual and nontraditional résumé, and someone who is willing to speak truth to power.”

Of course, not everyone in Hollywood has written a check for Wes Clark immediately upon meeting him. A few weeks before announcing his candidacy, Clark stopped at Dreamworks for lunch with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. “He was very articulate,” said Dreamworks executive Andy Spahn, who advises the Dreamworks founders on political issues and attended the lunch with Clark. “He was well-versed in the issues — particularly foreign policy — and seemed to have a very inclusive and/or progressive set of values that he applied to a wide range of issues.”

Still, neither Spielberg nor Katzenberg nor their Dreamworks partner, Democratic fundraising powerhouse David Geffen, has endorsed Clark or anyone else. Katzenberg gave $2,000 to John Edwards in the spring, but two grand in Hollywood does not an endorsement make. Neither Spielberg nor Geffen has given anything to any of the contenders yet.

“We still feel that it’s early and there’s no need to jump in at this point,” Spahn said. “We have relationships with many of the candidates, and we’re prepared to watch the race unfold.”

The Dreamworks trio are among the biggest guns still holding their powder — Geffen alone raised between $15 million and $20 million for Democrats during the Clinton years — but they aren’t the only ones. A lot of Hollywood’s heaviest hitters are waiting for the Democratic race to sort itself out, said Margery Tabankin, the former executive director of the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee who now advises Streisand and a number of other influential entertainment industry figures on political matters. Among those who are either spreading contributions among candidates or keeping their wallets closed for now: Haim “Power Rangers” Saban, Westwood One chairman Norm Pattiz, and Ron Burkle, an investment banker and grocery-store gazillionaire who moves in Hollywood circles.

Major contributors and fundraisers like these make the entertainment industry a key part of the national political fundraising system. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that analyzes political contributions, the movie, music and television industries have contributed nearly $150 million in federal races since the 1990 election cycle. That total places the entertainment industry eighth on the list of 100 “industries” tracked by the Center for Responsive Politics.

While most of the other top-20 contributing industries lean Republican or split their dollars between the parties, the entertainment industry — like lawyers and labor unions — tilts strongly toward Democrats. Over the years, Democrats have received 69 percent of the entertainment industry’s contributions; the oil and gas industry, by contrast, has given 74 percent of its contributions to Republicans, and even more now that one of its own is running for reelection.

The entertainment industry provided unprecedented support for Bill Clinton, giving Democrats more than $22 million to spend in federal races in 1992 and 1996. Hollywood fell in line — with even more money but a little less enthusiasm — for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman in 2000. Gore lacked Clinton’s starry charisma and had a wife who had railed against rock ‘n’ roll lyrics she deemed offensive. And Lieberman had spent so much of his time blasting Hollywood for forcing sex and violence on kids that the industry had little stomach for him as a vice presidential candidate.

“A lot of people in the industry put in a lot of money and time working for Gore-Lieberman,” said a Hollywood political advisor who worked on the Gore staff. “It was infuriating for them to fly all over the country to help the campaign only to have Lieberman go around demonizing them for destroying our children.”

Now that Lieberman is running on his own and, once again, attacking Hollywood, few in the industry are interested in backing his campaign. By Sept. 30, he had collected just $131,000 from the entertainment industry, the least of the major candidates other than the late-entering Clark. When CNN recently listed celebrity contributors in the presidential race, it named only one who lined up with Lieberman: Jerry Stiller, who played George Costanza’s Festivus-inventing father on “Seinfeld.”

That’s in stark contrast to the kind of success Dean has enjoyed in Hollywood. His contributors list is a veritable who’s who of the entertainment industry, especially those liberals galvanized and united by their dislike for and distrust of Bush.

Reiner, who has held fundraisers for Dean in California and is stumping for him in Iowa, first met the candidate a decade ago in the course of his work on children’s issues. Later, he sat with Dean at a governor’s convention in 1997 and talked with him then about the possibility of running for national office someday. “I just liked him so much,” Reiner recalls. “He’s such a straight shooter. He looks you in the eye, and it’s not bullshit. And I thought to myself, Wow, this is so unlike any politician I’ve ever met.”

When Reiner began to think about the 2004 race, he looked at the other candidates in the field and saw more similarities than differences. Dean stood out for his unequivocal opposition to the war in Iraq. “I got the sense that some of these other candidates were making political calculations and thinking, ‘This is something I should do because I don’t want to be on the wrong side of this issue and I don’t want to be seen as weak on national security,’” Reiner said. “Dean is a doctor, and he approached problems in a very practical way. He’ll diagnose the situation and say, ‘How do we solve this?’ instead of making a political calculation.”

Clark’s supporters in Hollywood — as they do elsewhere — whisper that Dean is too hot-headed to be president, that his anger at Bush doesn’t play well on TV and won’t resonate with more moderate voters in the general election. For his part, Reiner says that Clark’s supporters don’t understand that having a four-star general as a candidate isn’t enough to counteract the Republicans’ usual advantage on national defense issues.

Reiner says the other major Democratic candidates are compromised by the fact that they stood with Bush in the run-up to Iraq or waffled on their positions later. “I had a meeting with one of the candidates who promised that he would never agree to go to support without the U.N.,” Reiner said. “Then, the next day, I read that he said, ‘Regardless of whether the U.N. is being us or not, we should go in anyway.’ I want somebody who is going to be straightforward with me. I want to be with somebody I can trust, somebody I can count on.”

Earlier in the campaign, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards appeared to be the kind of candidate that could rally the Hollywood troops. He was fresh and fresh-faced, and for 15 minutes, at least, he was everybody’s favorite. “Initially, John Edwards came to town and everybody put him on the casting couch and decided, ‘Oh my God, this is Bill Clinton,’” said a political advisor to a celebrity who now backs Howard Dean. “He’s charming and from the South, and they thought he would be a great candidate. But I’m not aware of any of those people who currently support Edwards now.”

Another political advisor — this one, an early backer of Edwards who now works for several celebrities supporting Clark — said that Edwards never succeeded in capitalizing on the positive impressions he made early. “Dean really did a good job; he took his early support from Rob Reiner and really turned it into something,” the advisor said. “Edwards was given full exposure and money and whatnot, but it just didn’t grow the way some of us would have wanted it to.”

The other major contenders for the Democratic nomination have done much better in Hollywood. Kerry and Gephardt are known quantities among industry Democrats, many of whom have contributed to their congressional campaigns over the years. As a presidential candidate, Kerry has brought in about $411,000 from the entertainment industry, including contributions from Uma Thurman, Jerry Seinfeld, Bette Midler, Jamie Lee Curtis and Disney chief Michael Eisner. Although that put him second to Dean — at least before Clark’s late surge — Kerry has dropped off the Hollywood radar a bit in recent weeks as his campaign has foundered through staff firings and what is seen — fairly or not — as flip-flopping on Iraq.

Gephardt has collected nearly $300,000 from the entertainment industry, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Chevy Chase, Morgan Fairchild and Harvey Weinstein have contributed to Gephardt’s campaign, as have spread-the-wealth donors like Streisand and Larry David. Aaron Sorkin, creator of “The West Wing,” is hosting a fundraiser for him later this month. Gephardt is particularly popular with labor-friendly Democrats in the industry, although that selling point may be diminished in the wake of Dean’s recent endorsements from two large unions.

And while the political advisors for several stars note that Gephardt’s Hollywood take has been modest — at least compared to Dean’s and Kerry’s — they said that Hollywood could become more fertile ground for Gephardt, despite his initial support for the Iraq war, if he holds off Dean in Iowa and begins to look like the most promising non-Dean candidate. “People who are looking toward electability and who [have traditionally focused on issues of] race, poverty and class feel a real affinity for him,” explained one political consultant.

If money is any gauge, few in Hollywood feel such closeness for the minor Democratic candidates. According to the Center for Responsive Politics analysis, U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio had collected just under $40,000 from the entertainment industry by the end of September — less than a tenth of what Dean or Kerry drew. Al Sharpton had received about $27,000, while Carol Moseley Braun had collected just $4,000 — half as much as convicted felon Lyndon Larouche, who has been running for president in every campaign since 1976.

Bush has pulled in about $515,000 from Hollywood thus far. His contributors this time around include Chuck Norris and “Driving Miss Daisy” producers Richard and Lili Fini Zanuck, and reliably Republican celebrities like Tom Selleck, Kelsey Grammer and Bo Derek will likely lend their financial support to the Bush-Cheney campaign before November. Bush’s $515,000 take is more than what any one Democratic candidate has collected but only about a third as much as all the Democrats taken together.

“At the moment, we’ve got nine candidates splitting the pot on our side,” said Bergthold. Still, the Republicans have made some gains in Hollywood in recent years, particularly among younger donors on the business side of the industry and larger donors who play it safe by giving to both parties. “Everyone thinks of Hollywood as the relatively liberal set of actors we always talk about,” Weiss said. “But you’ve also got studio executives and other business folks who probably spread their money around like other businesses do.”

Still, no one doubts that Hollywood will come through big for the whichever candidate emerges from the Democratic primaries. And at that point, it won’t be just the $2,000 individual contributions allowed under the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law. McCain-Feingold prohibits “soft money” — the unrestricted cash that once flowed by the billions into the political parties — but no one thinks for a minute that those kinds of contributions are simply going to disappear. Loyalists aligned with both parties have begun to launch so-called 527 organizations — named for the applicable provision of the tax code — that can receive huge donations from corporations, unions and major donors because they’re not directly connected to the political parties themselves.

Hollywood money is already beginning to trickle into the 527s. Tuesday in Beverly Hills, Laurie David, “Seinfeld’s” Julia Louis-Dreyfus, “The Fabulous Baker Boys” producer Julie Bergman and a number of other politically active individuals from the entertainment industry will host a meeting to introduce — and solicit contributions for — two such groups, America Coming Together and the Media Fund, which are working together to get out the vote and buy anti-Bush advertising. The meeting — which Matt Drudge has hyped as a “Hate Bush” event — is a step in educating former “soft money” contributors about the opportunities presented by 527s, said an advisor to one of the celebrities involved in hosting the event.

While the 527s are not yet awash in Hollywood money, political advisors in the industry predict that the floodgates will open as soon as the Democrats have a nominee. “McCain-Feingold changed the rules a little bit, but it doesn’t take the money out of politics,” said Chad Griffin, a political advisor who works with Reiner. “The money just gets there in a different way. The only thing it did was we all got a lot of requests to meet with people with thoughts about why their 527 was the best one. You’ll still see a lot of support, and the people who supported the [Democratic] Party with those kinds of dollars will continue to support Democratic politics that way.”

It’s too early to tell whether the 527s will be able to match the prohibited “soft money” contributions dollar for dollar, just as it’s too early to tell whether the entertainment industry will eventually support the Democratic candidate with the same intensity of effort it threw behind Clinton or the dollars it threw at Gore. But talk to political activists and advisors in the industry, and you’ll hear again and again of one overarching goal: Beat Bush in 2004.

“Last time around, there was a lot more hoopla about the primaries,” said one advisor. “This time, people who have differences [of opinion about candidates] are prepared to set them aside and say, ‘We’ve got to beat Bush.’ That’s the overwhelming feeling rather than ‘Our guy has got to get the nomination.’”

And the key to beating Bush, Griffin and other political advisors said, is for Hollywood to unite behind the Democratic nominee as soon as his identity becomes clear. Spahn, the Dreamworks advisor, said he talked with Bill Clinton about this very point recently. “He said, ‘Andy, do you know what the difference is between Democrats and Republicans?’ He said: ‘Democrats always want to fall in love with a candidate, and Republicans just want to fall in line. We’ve got to fall in line with whoever our nominee is.’”

That message is echoing throughout Democratic Hollywood, where few are interested in risking a repeat of 2000, when Ralph Nader carried enough votes in Florida to deny Gore a decisive victory there. “I’ve been telling my Democratic friends, ‘Whoever our nominee is, we don’t complain, we love our nominee,’” Reiner said. “Whoever it is, we’d rather have him in the White House than George Bush.”

McHenry has been one of the most completely shameless of House Republicans since his arrival in Congress, in 2005, when he immediately and publicly endorsed Tom DeLay’s brilliant plan to exempt himself from ethics rules as his connections to Jack Abramoff began to end his career. But he was born to be cheerfully corrupt: He’s a product of the College Republicans, an organization that trains little Lee Atwaters, Karl Roves and Grover Norquists in the arts of scorched-earth campaigning and wholly irresponsible “governing” on behalf of the monied interests that bought you your job. The ethos is win by any means necessary, legal or quasi-legal (or worse, as long as you never get caught), and McHenry was very good at that, according to Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ memorable profile of the then-freshman in the Washington Monthly.

After the College Republicans, and a failed state legislature race, McHenry moved on to truly insidious conservative astroturfing/push-polling/communications firm DCI, then worked for Rove, then took a political appointment in the Bush administration, then moved to the district he now represents, where he started a real estate company that did not actually buy or sell any real estate, so that he could run for Congress as “a small businessman.”

Once in the United States House of Representatives, McHenry personally intervened in a wild and bloody College Republican National Committee chair election, on behalf of a personal friend of his who’d become slightly toxic after he sent fundraising letters attempting to trick “elderly people with dementia” into donating to the CRNC. And he was successful! The horrible kid won, against all odds:

In other phone calls, McHenry was more blunt: “He told me, and several of my friends that we were done in politics if we didn’t support him,” another College Republican chapter president told me. (McHenry has admitted that he and Deans made the calls but denied that they threatened anyone’s career). Over the course of two weeks, after a couple of a dozen calls, McHenry prevailed upon those in the North Carolina delegation to change their votes, removing three votes from Davidson’s column and putting them in Gourley’s. Gourley ended up winning by six votes; had North Carolina voted the other way, Davidson might have won.

Another of McHenry’s first acts in Congress, Wallace-Wells writes, was to champion a bill that was specifically written to rip off a large portion of his constituents, by making it “much harder for government to regulate or block the conversion of credit unions into banks …” He is a close ally of major consumer financial institutions with a plum assignment to the Committee on Financial Services, which is great for raising money.

It’s only natural that Elizabeth Warren, whose mission is to protect consumers from unethical and predatory practices by these institutions, is Patrick McHenry’s enemy. You can complain on his Facebook wall all you like, but the Republican from North Carolina is incapable of feeling embarrassment.

And his treatment of Warren will only make him a bigger conservative hero and an even more attractive investment opportunity for major banks.

“What? Are you sure? Where did you hear this?”

“It’s online.”

The texts and calls and tweets and Facebook posts and cable news ticker feeds piled up from there, morphing into that familiar buzzing audiovisual din. Our other atmosphere.

At first there was no actual news, just rumor and speculation. Finally the Sunday night shows were interrupted by reports that Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida mastermind and America’s most wanted criminal, might finally be dead, nine-and-a-half years after the worst-ever terrorist attack on American soil.

On NBC’s East Coast affiliates, the announcement of an impending presidential address cut into the final moments of “Celebrity Apprentice,” starring would-be Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. (Take that, you combed-over bigot.) Obama did not appear for another hour. After he spoke — confirming that bin Laden had been killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by Joint Special Operation Command forces working with the CIA — NBC and CBS returned to previously scheduled programming. ABC and the cable news channels stuck with the story. “The minute I heard that the president was doing an announcement at 10:30 and breaking into TV, I sort of guessed, I thought, ‘They got bin Laden,’” New York Sen. Chuck Schumer told New York’s WABC. “They wouldn’t break into TV for any other reason.”

Fox News Channel somehow managed to deliver comprehensible audio over the collective, bloody grinding of teeth, even when relaying a statement from ex-President George W. Bush congratulating Obama: “This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.”

“This will probably prove to be one of the most significant, if not the most significant accomplishments of the president,” NBC News White House correspondent Chuck Todd told anchor Brian Williams, in a bloc of live MSNBC coverage that displaced a taped program titled “Sex Slaves UK.”

On ABC, Debra Burlingame, the sister of Charles Burlingame, pilot of the hijacked flight that struck the Pentagon, told anchor George Stephanopoulos, “This has been a long time coming. It’s been rough because it pretty much dominated my life, all of these national security issues. And we’re not out of the woods yet, George, but this is really big.”

Yes.

So big that after a certain point, a New York-based TV columnist can no longer sit in his living room, typing on a laptop while stealing glances at a TV. Next stop, ground zero.

2.

The Cortlandt Street R train stop deposits riders on the perimeter of ground zero, in front of the Century 21 department store on Church Street, meters away from a chain link fence festooned with banners detailing the splendors that will appear on the former World Trade Center site: Freedom Tower. Reflecting pool. High-end retail shops.

At first the street seemed unnervingly quiet. Yes, it was 1:30 Monday morning at the the start of a work week, but this was supposed to be V-E Day all over again, at least in theory. Where were all the people?

Two blocks away, as it turned out: Klieg lights. Waving flags. The distant roar of a crowd’s cheer building and cresting:

“HhhhhhhhhhRRaaaaaaAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”

How many people were there? Thousands, I’m told. 

They’d stuck bunches of red and white roses into the fence and taped up signs: “Thanks, Barack!” “USA WINNING.” There was a scrawny young man in a red, white and blue top hat, and a tearful man with a hand-lettered sign that read, “He’s dead,” and a man holding an iPhone with a viewscreen spelling out, in huge letters, “OBAMA 1 OSAMA 0.” One woman came dressed in an Old Glory jumpsuit complete with hoodie.

“It feels like the world’s guiltiest criminal is now gone from this earth,” said Eric Brehm of Columbus, Ohio, who was visiting New York with his girlfriend, Megan Sander. “I’m happy for the people of New York and happy for the world.” Sander recalled watching the second plane hit on TV almost a decade ago. “My boss’ sister was a flight attendant on that plane,” she said.

A number of celebrants wore American flags as capes. “It’s an amazing night,” said one flag-caped celebrant, Juan Rodriguez of Cliffside Park, N.J. “I feel like I can breathe again.” He said the flag around his shoulders once belonged to his grandfather, who served in the Pacific during WWII.

Archie Archipolo, who grew up on the Lower East Side and has lived in lower Manhattan for over a decade, recalled the madness in this neighborhood nine-and-a-half years ago. “The Red Cross set up a station with bottles of water. There were tanks in the streets.”

Archipolo was wearing a VFW cap that belonged to his grandfather, who served in the 1st Division of the U.S. Army during World War II. He was there with his girlfriend, Danielle Cristiani, and her godson Max Sperling, a teenager who was 5 when the towers fell. “It was like a war zone down here,” Sperling recalled. “But it was so quiet that first night.”

“We lost friends, cousins that day,” Archipolo said. “Everyone did. Now I think we’re on the way back. But we have to be careful. It could happen again any time. It might not be as big as it was before. It could be some guys strapped with C-4.”

A young Navy officer in dress blues and a sailor in white joined a drunken civilian teenager atop a lamppost at the corner of Church and Vesey and led the crowd in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. 

3.

What didn’t come through in the TV feeds and newspaper stories was the peculiar character of the crowd: half in-the-moment, half outside of it.

There were engaged, ecstatic — and over time, increasingly tipsy — revelers. There were news vans and trucks with broadcast-quality cameras and bright lights and rumbling generators. There were roving reporters with notepads and hand-held digital tape recorders. I saw people collecting video and audio with their iPhones. One woman circled the outer edge of the crowd, holding her iPad slightly above her head, getting a smooth tracking shot around the edges of the gathering and double-checking her framing by glancing up at the screen.

In some sectors of the designated celebration zone — a two-block area ringed by cops and barricades — witnesses to history appeared to outnumber participants.

Then again, the distinction between participants might be a false one. Nowadays just about everybody has the ability to record his or her life at any time, for any reason, via digital stills, video, audio. And there was a whole lot of recording going on last night. Three young men in kilts climbed on top of a bank of pay phones and gave an impromptu bagpipe concert; the strobe-flash illumination of shutterbugs was so intense that they might as well have been performing on the floor of a disco. There were people taking video and still photos of cops, construction workers, Marines, sailors and civilians wrapped in American flags or carrying signs. There were people taking pictures of the people taking pictures. And there were people taking pictures of the people taking pictures of the people taking pictures.

Clouds of pot smoke occasionally wafted through the scene, and as the celebration wore on, it became harder to move through the throng without accidentally kicking an empty beer bottle and sending it clattering down the street.

If you stood back and squinted at the crowd, hundreds of rectangles of electronic light seemed to bob like embers on a dark wave. People were showing each other their iPhones, sharing Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, uploaded and downloaded photos, YouTube clips, streaming video from CNN. They were discussing the coverage, repeating what they’d heard, saying what they did or didn’t believe.

“They should show pictures of the raid, pictures of the body, a picture, something,” a man holding a bottle of water told a man holding a tall can of Budweiser. “They have to show proof that he’s dead, that it’s him they shot, otherwise the tinfoil hats come out.”

And yet despite the anxiety and intense self-consciousness, there was a bustling energy to the gathering, with undertones of joy, relief and hope — plus a brute satisfaction than somebody finally tracked the son of a bitch down and put one in his brain. Songs and chants erupted and faded, some merely patriotic, others belligerent: “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “America the Beautiful.” “You ess AY! You ess AY” “Nah nah NAH nah!/Nah nah NAH nah!/Hey HEY-YYYYY/Good BYE!” One especially wasted young man lunged at a TV camera and yelled, “Iran is next! I don’t care what anybody says! Iran is next!”

Jonathan Jirack, formerly of Pittsburgh, left his apartment near ground zero around 2 a.m. bearing a hand-lettered sign that read, “We cheer for [PEACE SYMBOL], not death.” He walked through the crowd for hours holding it over his head. “I saw the gathering on TV and I thought, ‘I need to go down there and try to put an asterisk on the event,’” he said. “I understand the jubilation. I can feel it. But a lot of people are watching this thing on TV, and I’m afraid what we’re putting out there can be manipulated or misinterpreted.”

“That’s noble,” said Kevin Caslava, a San Diego-born writer who has lived in New York off and on for a decade, indicating Jirack’s sign. “But you’ve also got people here chanting, ‘Fuck Osama,’ so it’s not like what you’re describing is the only subtext out here.”

They argued politely about the sign — Jirack insisting that most of the people here were more relieved and happy than bloodthirsty, even though it might not come across that way on TV, and Caslava was taking a more skeptical view.

“Look, I get it,” Caslava said. “I feel a deep-rooted satisfaction, but also a sense of, ‘Should I be cheering because a man got shot?’ I’ve traveled a lot, and I’ve met people who argued for bin Laden as a freedom fighter, as somebody who had reasons for what he did. When you hear them talk, intellectually you understand the reasons, even though you have a visceral hatred of what happened in this country, right here on our own soil. Deep inside us, there’s a very strong voice for war. You try to be rational, but there’s that voice inside that says, ‘Fuck this.’ That’s the voice I’m hearing here, mostly.”

“And,” he added, “when you’re watching news from Middle Eastern countries and you see people holding up signs in Arabic, how do you know what they’re saying? If you can’t read Arabic, you can’t know. You might think what’s on that Arabic sign was a message of peace when it’s actually something like, ‘Fuck all y’all!’ How do you know that somebody in another country where they don’t speak English won’t look at your sign and just not understand it at all? Or misinterpret it?”

“That’s why I put the peace symbol on there,” Jirack said.

4.

Back in Brooklyn again after a brief subway ride in an R train car filled with mostly sleeping people and other awake persons — fellow pilgrims to ground zero who thought the timing of Obama’s announcement was a bit too convenient, that maybe the president delayed the raid, or delayed announcing the news, until tonight because it would put a lid on the celebrations.

“They were building up to this raid for weeks,” a man said. “He didn’t give the go-ahead last night. Why? Because if he’d done it last night, Saturday night, around the same time as tonight, the word would have gone out when half the people in America were already half-drunk, and then what would the TV have shown? It would have been insanity. So he waits until late Sunday night. Everybody’s happy, but they’re tired. They want to celebrate, but they also gotta go to work in the morning.”

“Not everything is a conspiracy,” another rider said.

“They’re very precise in how they manage the country,” the first rider said. “They got shaping P.R. down to an exact science.”

Home at last.  The kids were zonked out. On CNN, Steve Bernstein, whose brother Billy died on 9/11 when Cantor-Fitzgerald’s World Trade Center offices went up in smoke, said that when he heard about bin Laden, “I felt like my brother could finally rest in peace. I felt the same way.”

Then the newscast cut to correspondent Ted Rowlands reporting live from “a hookah lounge in Anaheim, California” at 2 a.m. Pacific. His topic: the reaction of Muslim-Americans. He sidled over to one side of the club and approached a couple of attractive young women. “Leila,” he said, extending his microphone to one of them, “as a Persian-American, give it to me: What is your reaction to Osama bin Laden being killed?”

“We’re elated that someone who is the biggest symbol of terrorism is finally gone now,” Leila said. “And I can’t wait to see his picture now, to be honest with you.”

Rowlands led the camera crew toward the back of the club, where the owner was waiting for him. Ninety minutes earlier, Rowlands explained, the owner — a U.S. armed forces veteran — had been the victim of a drive-by egging. There was still a splotch of yolk on his shirt.

“This is Mohammed, the establishment’s owner,” Rowlands explained. “He was actually hit in the neck by an egg.”

“Good job, U.S. Army, and Marines, everybody, Obama, we’re glad that’s over with,” Mohammed said. 

Rowlands followed up: ”Does it help? Do you think this is the beginning of the end of discrimination here in America, or no, is it an ongoing thing?”

“It’s gonna be an ongoing thing as long as we have a lot of the biased media and ignorant people out here,” Mohammed said. “Hopefully, this brings a little closure … We’re happy that he’s dead, we’re happy that he’s gone.”

I glanced down at my laptop. In my Twitter feed was a link to a wire story saying that Osama bin Laden’s corpse had already been buried at sea.

“It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” Mehlman tells Ambinder. Plus he recently moved:

Mehlman said that his formal coming-out process began earlier this year. Over the past several weeks, he has notified former colleagues, including former President Bush. Once he realized that the news would probably leak, he assembled a team of former advisers to help him figure out the best way to harness the publicity generated by the disclosure for the cause of marriage rights. He is worried that some will see his decision to go public as opportunistic. Mehlman recently moved to Chelsea, a gay mecca in New York City.

Hm.

Well, welcome to being on the right side of one issue, Ken. (And this marks another one that Mike Rogers was right about.)

The Obamas’ answer is usually some variation of: “Work really fucking hard for it.” Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the couple is that while their marriage is most often held up by others as an ideal to aspire to — or flat-out envy — the two people in it, when asked, spend much of their time dissecting the ways in which they have failed each other. “The image of a flawless relationship,” writes Jodi Kantor, is, according to Michelle, “the last thing we want to project. It’s unfair to the institution of marriage, and it’s unfair to young couples trying to build something, to project this perfection that doesn’t exist.”

Although it seems paradoxical that one of the most envied couples in the nation is also one of the most vocal about the hardships of marriage, it makes a certain amount of sense. Certainly, the Obamas wouldn’t have the luxury of nitpicking at the flaws, major and minor, of their relationship if others made a habit of doing so, too. But they have quite a bit of distance to fall before they would succeed in knocking themselves off their own pedestal. And in many ways, it’s entirely consistent with the rest of their philosophy: Just as one’s accomplishments shouldn’t be limited by birth, marriage isn’t about who you are, it’s about what you do. And just as you’d expect, the Obamas see yet another “teachable moment” in describing the mechanics of their marriage.

The first couple recognizes that their personal life is political; Kantor even describes it as central to Barack’s overall “political brand.” But politics itself is the thing that, for a time, made their personal life nearly untenable. She writes: “Since he first began running for office in 1995, Barack and Michelle Obama have never really stopped struggling over how to combine politics and marriage: how to navigate the long absences, lack of privacy, ossified gender roles and generally stultifying rules that result when public opinion comes to bear on private relationships.”

In fact, when you read the Obamas’ account of their marriage, the shocking thing is that any family manages to combine the stress of marriage and politics, much less endure the unfortunate side effect of having their marriages scrutinized by an unforgiving public. Let’s just start here: Until moving into the White House, the family had not lived full-time under the same roof since 1996, two years before Malia was born. To repeat: Barack has been at least a part-time absent father and husband for nearly 13 years.

This left Michelle, obviously, to care for their two children largely on her own. “She was in a lot of ways a single mom, and that was not her plan,” says Susan Sher, her former boss and current chief of staff, who remembers that Michelle showed up for her interview at University of Chicago Medical Center carrying newborn Sasha, because her sitter had canceled. Not only was she left with the bulk of the childcare, but Barack’s political career wasn’t enough to pay the bills, leaving her to earn the income as well. As Barack recalls, “She said, ‘Well, you’re gone all the time and we’re broke. How is that a good deal?’” (Note that the guy who put her in the situation is also the guy who remembers just exactly what he did.)

How indeed? The answer, it seemed to be, was that Michelle just happened to find herself married to a Great Man, though neither of them knew it yet. “Barack doesn’t belong to you,” Michelle’s friend Yvonne Davilia recalls telling her back in the mid-’90s, when Barack was finishing up his memoir and considering getting into politics. But at first, Michelle “just wasn’t ready to share” her husband. Which begs the question: With what? His future destiny as leader of the free world? And would that destiny have been possible had a Great Woman, who also happened to be his intellectual and professional equal, not stepped in to look after the more prosaic concerns of raising the children and collecting a paycheck? “That was sort of an eye-opener to me, that marriage is hard,” says Michelle. “But going into it, no one tells you that. They just tell you, ‘Do you love him? What does the dress look like?’”

At this point it might be worth noting that in seeing a temporary absence from his family as a fair price to pay for greater goals, Barack was not simply following the model of his father (who had “fleeting” relationships with his wives and children), but also the model of his mother, who spent long periods of time away from her children while working as an anthropologist in Indonesia. Michelle had to point out to him, according to Sher, that a lot of parenting is about “sheer physical presence, which wasn’t something he was used to.”

The very essence of marriage is finding ways to calibrate individual aspirations with the cumbersome, day-to-day workings of a larger family unit. And it’s beyond ludicrous that those people whose individual achievements make their family lives most visible — politicians, actors, writers, musicians — are often those whose family lives are most compromised by the costs of individual achievement. But in asking us to take a good long look behind the curtain of their marriage, the Obamas have given us a better lesson in the real costs and benefits of family values than any fairy tale could.

Joining us to impart their advice and analysis are three Democrats who have advised presidents and presidential candidates. Kenneth Baer, a former senior speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, is the co-founder and co-editor of the progressive quarterly Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He is also the head of Baer Communications, a Democratic speechwriting and policy-consulting firm. Democratic strategist and media consultant Steve McMahon is a partner in the firm McMahon, Squier and Lapp. A former aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy, McMahon has worked as a strategist and consultant on three presidential campaigns, most notably Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and, later, Dean’s successful race for Democratic National Committee chairman. Laurie Moskowitz is founder and principal of Fieldworks, a firm that specializes in voter contact and ground mobilization. In 2000, she directed the Democratic National Committee’s national field effort that helped produce Al Gore’s national popular vote victory.

Tom Schaller: We are a week away from the election. Obama seems to have a lead of 5 to 7 points, depending on which polls you look at. I’d like to open the conversation by asking what the key priorities of the Obama campaign, or really any presidential campaign with that kind of lead and a few precious days to go, should be.

Kenneth Baer: I think right now it’s not to become complacent. This campaign, more so than other campaigns, has generated a huge amount of excitement. Look at it like potential energy. The trick is to convert that potential energy to real energy on Election Day. You just can’t get people saying, “My vote is not going to matter, Obama is up 10 points, I don’t need to go out and vote. It’s cold out, it’s rainy.” [You can't have] staff people who are like, “I don’t need to work that hard, we’re going to win this anyway.” Just really keeping motivated, that’s the big challenge.

Steve McMahon: Obama’s got a great lead on paper. There are an enormous number of new voters, which were all pretty much signed up by the Obama campaign. So he has the opportunity to expand his lead even further. But if he gets complacent at all, it’s dangerous. The best thing to do when you’re winning is to keep doing what you’re doing because that’s the reason you’re winning. He needs to be aggressive, he needs to continue to draw out the distinctions between himself and McCain. He needs to continue making people comfortable with the notion of Barack Obama as president of the United States and I think he’s done a really good job doing that to this point. As the McCain campaign reaches into the toolbox and discovers they’ve got nothing left to throw but the kitchen sink, it’s important for Obama to stay on his game and not be distracted.

Schaller: Laurie Moskowitz, I assume the one group in a campaign that’s definitely not ramping things down at this point is the field crowd, the get-out-the-vote people. They’re just going into high gear, right?

Laurie Moskowitz: Yeah, the field group is basically staying up all night, putting their organization together. And that’s what it comes down to at this stretch, is having the organization that can turn all these new voters out, that can find these people on Election Day. To make sure all the people who have already voted are taken off the rolls so that we can marshal resources and make sure that we have targeted lists on Election Day and that it all comes together in one sort of final orchestration that makes it all work.

Schaller: There was a lot of criticism of John Kerry four years ago that he didn’t tell us what the national message was until a week after the campaign. It was apparently something called JHOS — jobs, healthcare, opportunities, security. But people criticized him for not articulating that properly during the campaign. And then of course there was the Osama bin Laden video. What kind of message do you want to deliver in the last week?

Baer: I think this is something where for a Democrat who has been involved in campaigns in 2000 and 2004, we’re in a strange situation where we have a candidate who started his campaign with a message and has kept that message consistently for the entire length of this campaign. Everyone knows what Barack Obama’s about, it’s about the change we need. That message has been fleshed out a bit over time, but it’s basically been the same thing. And it’s working. It’s a man and a message and a moment all coming together. The advice to the Obama campaign is continue what you’re doing. One of the more important components to that is to make sure that the campaign continues to be on the offense. For the last two weeks, the Obama campaign needs to be setting the terms of the debate and not John McCain, and it has to be proactive, not reactive.

McMahon: To my way of thinking, the JHOS, or whatever it was, wasn’t really a message at all. What it was was a series of issues and issue positions that didn’t really ladder up to anything that was clear to voters. I think what the Obama campaign has done so well is what, frankly, Republicans usually do well, which is they’ve set a frame for Barack Obama’s campaign and for what he represents and everything that they do ladders up to and reinforces that frame. And the frame, as Ken pointed out, is change we need. And it’s very, very clear to people that Barack Obama wants to take the country in a new direction. And it’s very clear that he wants to take it in a direction that is fundamentally different than the direction the president has taken us on. And it’s also pretty clear because they’ve set a frame for John McCain early in this race that they’ve stuck to very, very religiously and that is he’s John McSame. He’s going to just give us four more years of George Bush.

If you look at the polling numbers, that frame has stuck on John McCain. That’s really what he’s struggling with and the fact that he’s now trying to carry around Sarah Palin, who after initially looking like perhaps it might be an interesting choice that could change the dynamic of the race, turns out to have been a reckless and dangerous and erratic choice that people have figured out. They’re now wondering what kind of judgment John McCain has.

Schaller: Let me rephrase this question for Laurie. Is it easier to do field work in a race like this where your candidate has been consistent?

Moskowitz: It definitely makes it easier because I think people know what they’re voting for. They know what they’re going out and casting their ballot for and that’s a much easier choice for people to make. I think in some places where people are seeing polls and they’re so overwhelmingly for Obama, people do start to think, “Oh well, it just won’t matter if I get to the polls that day.” You have to convince them that’s not the case, that it actually does matter.

Schaller: We know that Obama, with all this money, has bought this huge chunk of time, I don’t know if it’s the night before or Sunday night, but he’s going to have this 30-minute segment. We’ve seen this done in the past. How do you handle that, Steve? What would you do? It’s usually this very glossy, biographical thing. Do you think he will do the traditional thing with that or will he do something different?

McMahon: I actually think it’s the precursor to his State of the Union speech. What I mean by that, I think what he wants to do is frame the race and frame for people what it would look like and what it would feel like if Barack Obama became president of the United States. And so my suspicion is there will be less bio and it will be less like a commercial and more like a serious, thoughtful speech that talks about the challenges the country faces, that expresses the optimism and aspiration that we can address together as Americans in a bipartisan way and meet whatever challenges we face. It begins to set a frame for Sen. Obama becoming President Obama. It also gives him an opportunity, if there are any lingering issues out there that he needs to resolve or address — which, by the way, I don’t think there are at this point — it gives him an opportunity to address those. It’s a great luxury to have the ability and the financial resources to do a half-hour before the election. And it’s something that’s going to make this race even more difficult for John McCain to close. The financial resource advantage has been enormous. And that half-hour on every major network in prime time is going to make it even more difficult.

Moskowitz: Having him out there looking so presidential is just a huge factor in this. For the people who still are undecided, for them, it’s feeling comfortable with him. I think putting him in that presidential state is just the way to go. I think it’s a great tactic and a luxury we [Democrats] haven’t seen.

Baer: It’s interesting listening to you two guys because I’ve actually been puzzled by what he would do with the half-hour. It sounds like, Laurie and Steve, the Obama campaign is going to put him out there in an Oval Office sort of setting and speak directly into the camera. I thought they would just do the heavily glossy production laying out the case. Do you know things I don’t?

Moskowitz: There won’t be any Greek columns.

McMahon: No, I’m just guessing, but as we say in Texas, we’re fixing to find out.

Schaller: This election for the most part has been a referendum on Obama and whether voters feel comfortable with him. I think we’ve seen in the last month, particularly since the bailout crisis, that voters have become comfortable. If you’re Obama, do you talk about your opponent if you’re ahead at this point or do you just talk about yourself?

McMahon: I think the race first was a referendum on George Bush and second it was a referendum on Barack Obama. And by that I mean, Sen. Obama became the nominee in the midst of a fairly vociferous desire for change. And I believe he leveraged that very, very effectively. And what the McCain campaign did, beginning with the celebrity ad up to about three or four weeks ago, was it made it a referendum on Barack Obama and I think he passed that test in the debates and by his behavior and by his steady response to the financial crisis. Obviously the financial crisis made it a challenge for both candidates, but Barack Obama rose to the challenge and John McCain didn’t. I don’t think he needs to or should address Sen. McCain. But I do think that it’s smart for him to talk about a new direction and how the president, who’s not very popular at all right now, took us down a road that it’s going to require great determination and a willingness to work together to get back on track. I think that every time he does that, he benefits and hits Sen. McCain without ever having to mention Sen. McCain’s name.

Baer: I think that you can’t look too far past Nov. 4. The McCain campaign is really trying to land some punches and they’re throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, and some of those are going to stick. I always believe, and maybe this is an early lesson I learned, that you always need to be on the offensive. Always, always, always. Attack, attack, attack. I don’t mean personal attacks, but be on the offensive in terms of the debate. And if that means engaging John McCain directly, that means engaging John McCain directly. He is the nominee and everyone knows that. You just can’t let up the pressure. The race is not an 8- or 10-point race right now. It’s not going to end up being that way. This is going to tighten, this is going to be a close election or it’s going to feel close or be close on Election Day. You really need to keep up the pressure.

Schaller: Laurie, I wonder if attacking or, inversely, being attacked is good for mobilization even if it’s just at the volunteer level. Does it ratchet up the level of intensity of the people in the field?

Moskowitz: Well, I certainly think that attacks in general ratchet things up in the field. It would depend on what it is, how the campaign responds. There are so many what-ifs in that scenario. You know, can it help? It could. I think Kenny’s right in the sense that the campaign can’t let up. We don’t want them to and we can’t afford to. This isn’t going to be a landslide. We’ll take whatever we can to mobilize people. But I think all these attacks they’re throwing at Obama just help us motivate people and make them even more eager to get out here and win this election.

Schaller: Speaking of the field stuff, we hear so much reported about this amazing apparatus that the Obama people have put together. Laurie, what exactly have they built and how is it going to perform? Given the early voting, I guess it’s already performing.

Moskowitz: It’s definitely real. It’s phenomenal. And I think, whether it’s a buzzword or not, it’s organic. This is the sort of field operation that everybody always dreams of in the sense that this is really people from the ground up taking initiative, seizing opportunity and being allowed to have the tools and resources at their disposal to do what they need to do. The Obama campaign should be given great credit in sensing the momentum that was there on the ground and empowering people to do what they wanted to do, whether that’s having a local office in every little town that people could go to and participate, to using different technology, to figuring out what works best in their neighborhoods and really allowing the staff on the ground a lot of leeway in developing the plan and not dictating from the top down. Of course there are goals, there are things they measure. They know how many voters they need to turn out, but how they get there and the way that they can motivate people and the types of tools they have at their disposal, it’s definitely a new operation the likes of which we’ve not seen before.

Schaller: In the past Democrats were relying on union labor in the last week or they had to rely on 527s like Kerry did. Is it that it’s more command control from David Plouffe this time around, is that one of the features that makes it better? Or is it that they have a lot more money and people are just excited about the candidate and that makes them work hard?

Moskowitz: No, it’s not more command and control. Again, there’s framework, there’s structure, there’s goals. But again, they’ve really let the people on the ground dictate how they reach those goals. They’ve provided them with a slate of tools to use. They’ve really amped up their technology in terms of what lists people can call off of. They’ve definitely given people sweet things like platforms for auto calls so a state director can literally connect to their voters directly and not go through a vendor; they contact voters off of their computers. The other half of it is they just have the energy and the enthusiasm of their volunteers and they let them run things locally. So you might have a true volunteer, not a staffer, who’s running a county and reporting to a staffer, that person who could be a local teacher or a local lawyer running something. It just doesn’t matter; as long they’re willing to take the responsibility and contact voters, they’re included in the operation.

Schaller: Steve and Kenny, is this the wave of the future? The campaign figures out the strategy but leaves the tactics to the locals? We sort of saw this with the Bush campaign’s use of the evangelicals and the 72-hour program four years ago, so I gather that this is the new mobilization method, right?

Baer: Well, maybe. There’s something very exhilarating about the Obama candidacy on many levels. One, obviously, is the historic nature of it. The barriers he’s breaking. That makes it very exhilarating. But part of it that’s exhilarating, is that you just don’t know if it’s going to work or not. This is the field program that you’ve dreamed of. The type of candidacy you dream of. It feels like “The West Wing.” We have an incredibly inspirational candidate with a clear message who just does the right thing; people feel good about it and all that, but it’s exhilarating partly because we don’t know if it’s going to work. It’s a huge gamble.

We know the safe thing is to identify super primary voters, people who vote a lot, find them, identify them and drag them out to vote. That’s how you win. Registering a million new voters like they’ve done nationwide, hundreds of thousands in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then finding them again and getting them to vote when political science tells you that voting is a habit, that people who vote previously are the ones that will vote prospectively, that’s a high-risk strategy, and it’s exhilarating. Because if it works, we’ve just done something great. It’s great for democracy. I hope it works. And there’s every indication it will work. But it really is a huge step, it’s a gamble. Then again, the Obama campaign hasn’t been successful because it’s done the tried and true. It’s been successful because it has done things differently.

Moskowitz: I think what’s also interesting about their volunteer base is the willingness of these people to contact other voters, other people in their community. Sometimes you can have candidates who inspire people, they make people feel good, but then that’s not necessarily translated in the ability to actually turn people out to vote. I’m even seeing it in some of the races I work with around the country; you can turn out a ton of people for a rally but then when you ask them to go door to door, they don’t necessarily want to do that. The Obama folks are doing that. They’re going door to door, they’re getting people to vote early, they’re making phone calls from their homes, they’re doing it all with enthusiasm and excitement and dragging people with them along the way.

Schaller: It’s been reported that Obama is delegating some of his staff to help in certain down-ballot races. Is that a sign of confidence or is it a sign of overconfidence? Should you be conserving every last resource or is Obama really trying to build himself that governing majority he talked about back in January and February?

McMahon: I don’t think it’s a sign of overconfidence. I think he is trying to build the majority he is talking about. Remember, the people who are on Barack Obama’s staff are not going to turn out the vote for a member of Congress or a congressional candidate without making sure that Barack Obama is covered. I think it’s just a way to spread the field and make Republicans have to defend more than just John McCain, make them have to defend Republican incumbents and challengers all over the country. If you talked for a second about what the Dean vision of the DNC ought to be, an operation that empowers or enables the grass roots to occur in 50 states at the same time and not just in 18, the Obama campaign has actually taken that idea and blown it out as well. He’s organized; even in places where he’s not necessarily competitive, they’ve got campaigns. They’re going to make a difference in getting him closer perhaps, getting him over the top and getting a lot of Democrats closer or over the top along the way.

Moskowitz: Steve’s absolutely right. They’re not going to go do this where it doesn’t help them, but I think it will help build him some goodwill. There are going to be a lot of new people, if all these new people turn out; they’re not necessarily schooled to vote down the ballot and I think for some of these congressional races especially, and certainly with the ballot initiatives, having people vote down the ballot is really, really important. I think for him it is a way to have it both ways. Build a governing majority, build goodwill for himself and also make sure that some of these House races and ballots that are on the line get pulled over the top because you can help. I think it makes complete sense for them to be doing it.

Schaller: Ken, you’ve written about realignments. Are these the type of things you need to do to have some sort of fundamental shift?

Baer: That’s a good question. It’s a question of is a realignment something that you can instigate on your own, something operationally that you can make, or is it something that just happens? Realignment, we know, happens not at the election that it started, but two or three elections after and you look back and say there was a significant partisan shift. Looking at the more reliable polling, at the demographics, you’re not seeing the type of huge partisan shift that would show that this is realigning election. I think it’s a repudiation of the past eight years and of the Republican Party and we’ve got to see what happens next. If states like Virginia or North Carolina or Colorado start behaving differently, then we will see 2008 as possibly a realignment or just the beginning of a new political era. One thing to keep in mind is that two-thirds of Americans were not alive the last time a Northern Democrat won the White House. It could be the end of an era — or it’s an anomaly of some kind. It takes real skill to screw up the country like it’s screwed up now. And George Bush had that skill. It could just be, listen, we need someone else. And then you go back to this normal partisan attachment, normal partisan behavior.

Schaller: We know that Obama raised $150 million last month, $66 million the month before. It was just reported today, he’s already raised $36 million in October so far. That totals up to over $200 million, which is roughly equivalent to what Hillary Clinton raised, if you don’t count the loans she gave herself, in all of 2007 and 2008 combined. It’s definitely more than what McCain raised in all of 2007 and 2008 combined. You get a call a week before the election and the Obama campaign wants to know, they have so much money, they want to know what they should do with that money in the final week. What do you tell them?

McMahon: I tell them give it to Ken.

Baer: Hire Steve.

McMahon: I would encourage them, if they have that kind of resource available, to be generous with the party committees, because, again, you’ve got races all over the country that are unexpectedly close. And the DCCC could certainly use an infusion of hard money that they could then go give directly to a campaign or that they could spend on behalf of a candidate, and I’m sure Chuck Schumer over at the Democratic Senate Committee would feel the same way. And if they wanted to share a little with Howard Dean, who could then take it to some of the down-ballet races around the country, I’m sure he’d be very grateful. There are a lot of things they could do with it to generate goodwill and also to generate a bigger electoral victory for Democrats on Nov. 4. And that’s what I’d encourage them to do with it, once their needs are taken care of.

Moskowitz: Well, that and of course more lawn signs. No, I completely agree. These operations, this is sort of the brass tacks. This is rubber meets the road for the party. We can win a lot more races with more resources. That’s a great answer. I wholeheartedly agree.

Baer: I look at it differently. I’m sort of torn. Not really where the money is sent to or what avenues it goes through. But, to me, it seems like it’s a fundamental question of do you keep expanding the map in order to make McCain stretch his own resources or do you absolutely lock down your 270? And that to me is a tough, tough question. It looks like now the Obama campaign is going into West Virginia. That’s expanding the map. It’s a cheap way to expand the map because West Virginia shares a media market with Pennsylvania and Ohio, but at what point do you say, let’s just lock down our 270 or 300 electoral votes and let’s not waste money going after Montana or Georgia or South Dakota, that’s sort of really on the bubble but may actually be in play?

Schaller: We’ve reached the final question. We’ll go in reverse alphabetical order so Laurie can go first this time. Give me one must do for Obama in the last week and one definitely do not do for Obama in the last week.

Moskowitz: One must do? Seal the deal now. Make sure you have people on the streets getting them out. They’re already doing it. They know they need to do this. It is what closes the deal at the end of the day. One must not do? How do you say this? Do no harm. Get through, keep the strategy strong, keep on the offensive, do everything you need to do, cross your t’s and dot your i’s. Hold your breath for the last day.

McMahon: The must do is stay hopeful, stay optimistic and continue to inspire confidence in people all the way through to the end. You want to make sure all your GOTV stations are covered, and for the one must not do, don’t go to church at Rev. Wright’s church on Sunday before the election. Just stay away for another week.

Baer: Yeah, that’s very good advice and I think there is an infinite universe of things that would be hard for us to guess that could happen. But I think the one thing that’s a must do is stay on the offensive. Keep framing the election. The Obama campaign needs to be in charge of this narrative and what this campaign is going to be about. One thing not to do, don’t talk to your transition team. Don’t even think about Nov. 5 right now. I think there are people whose jobs are to do that, but just in the last days, especially, stay focused and get over the line. And then get ready to govern.

Schaller: That’s some great advice all the way around. It will be a fascinating last week and a potentially momentous election.