“This is not going to help the progressive cause in America,” Dean continued. “The thing that upsets me so much about this is, you have the right to … get in bed with whoever you want to, but don’t call the Democratic Party full of corporate interests. They have their problems, we all have ours, none of us are pure. And this campaign of yours is far from pure.”

Dean’s riff was greeted with gleeful applause, and Nader appeared momentarily shaken by its ferocity. Dean insisted, “My purpose here is not to smear Ralph Nader,” which prompted Nader to respond sarcastically, “Oh, no. Not at all!”

Because the debate was sponsored by the scrupulously evenhanded National Public Radio, the room at the National Press Club was filled with equal numbers of the opposing camps. The Nader section tried to pump some wind back into their guy, squealing with laughter at his teenager-like rejoinder. Dean plowed through their applause. “I urge you not to turn your back on your own legacy,” he pleaded to the consumer advocate.

The exchange took place against a backdrop of polls showing that Nader may play the spoiler for Democrats again this year as he did in 2000, when he siphoned votes in key states from presidential candidate Al Gore and helped put George W. Bush in the White House. But now, having provoked hostility from many Democrats with his quixotic but damaging third-party run in 2000, Nader is having trouble finding a third party to call his own. Last month, he was rejected at the convention of the Green Party under whose banner he ran in 2000. He’s straining to get on state ballots via minor third parties, including the rump of the Reform Party, founded by Ross Perot and last used as a vehicle by far-right-winger Pat Buchanan in 2000. Nader recently pulled out of Arizona after a group of voters backed by the state Democratic Party challenged the validity of signatures he had collected to gain ballot access.

Yet Nader appeared unbowed in the debate. He was alternately charming and strident, returning again and again to his theme that American politics is a puppet pulled by the strings of corporate America. While most progressives would cite the invasion under false pretenses of Iraq as the major issue of the campaign, Nader said it was “the domination of our country by a concentration of greed and power in the hands of multinational corporations who have no allegiance to our country other than to control it or abandon it as they see fit.” Almost as an afterthought, he slammed John Kerry and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, for voting for the congressional resolution to authorize the war in Iraq, and accused Dean, who opposed the war, of abandoning his principles by his support of the Democratic ticket. Nader also called for a pullout of American troops from Iraq. But he kept returning to his basic theme that the Democrats can accomplish nothing but betrayal: “If you really want to do something about poverty and the criminal justice system and the failed war on drugs, how can all that fit inside a Democratic Party that has ignored, year after year, changes for a more just and prosperous America?”

Dean parried effectively, with the directness that helped win him a fervent following during the primaries, before he crumpled after his third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. “I’d grant you that there is significant corporate influence that we don’t like,” he said, and pointed out that Nader should not let the “perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Dean continued: “I’m not running for president right now, not just because I lost in Iowa, but [because] I made the calculation that if I did, I would take away votes that would otherwise go to John Kerry and result in the reelection of George Bush. That is a national emergency, and we cannot have it. My argument simply is, When the house is on fire, it’s not the time to fix the furniture.”

Nader assailed the two-party system, asserting that it stifled new debate, and accused the Democratic Party of trying to thwart him. He got an assist from a surprise guest — John Anderson, who ran as an independent in 1980, and asked a question from the audience about whether third-party candidates should be allowed to participate in general-election debates between the Republican and Democratic nominees. Nader said it “ought to be enough” if a majority of Americans say in polls that they want a third-party candidate to debate. “There is no other way to reach tens of millions of Americans other than to go through the gateway of the two parties,” Nader said. But Dean, noting the frustrations of debating in the Democratic primaries with nine other candidates, said he endorsed some limits.

Moderator Margo Adler, host of NPR’s “Talking Justice” program, asked Nader why he didn’t simply run in the Democratic primary, if exposure to his ideas was his goal. “It’s called freedom,” Nader said. “Freedom of conscience, to authentically communicate the necessities to the American people without the trappings of special-interest commercial cash.” Adler asked Dean if the Democratic Party, in opposing Nader’s bid, is showing hostility to third parties. “Not to my knowledge,” Dean said.

But the most entertaining — and revealing — moments came during Dean’s repeated hammering of Nader for the perceived compromises he was making to maintain his precarious candidacy. Again, he returned to the issue of Nader’s support in Oregon from Republican-leaning religious conservative groups.

“It is true,” said Dean, “that the Oregon Family Council, which is a virulently antigay right-wing group, called up all their folks and tried to get them to go to the Oregon convention to sign your petition. I don’t think that’s the way to change the party … The way to change this country is not to get into bed with right-wing antigay groups to try to get yourself on the ballot. That can’t work.”

Nader’s response was to smear Dean as guilty of smearing. “You know what a legitimate smear is, Howard? It’s a smear, premeditated and known. We don’t even know this group. Don’t try and tar us with this.” Dean urged Nader to simply renounce the Oregon group.

“I’ll renounce them,” Nader said, quickly shifting the focus of the debate. “Do you renounce Pfizer and Chevron and other companies who were criminally convicted of crimes by the federal government for giving millions of dollars in the year 2000 to the Democratic Party?”

Dean replied that the need to institute public financing of political campaigns is one reason he ran for president and another reason for progressives to support Kerry. “It’s not going to happen under George Bush.” Then, thrusting again at Nader’s soft underbelly, Dean asked him to return the money his campaign had received from Richard Egan, a Bush fundraiser from Massachusetts who served as Bush’s ambassador to Ireland.

“I wasn’t aware he was a corporate criminal,” Nader said in defense of Egan. “He’s an American citizen. He might be a Republican, but he just happens to believe in civil liberties, maybe. I don’t even know the man. But Republicans are human beings, too.” At this, Nader’s supporters applauded vigorously, a moment that crystallized how unmoored from principle the consumer advocate’s movement has become.

Harping again on how unfair the election process is, Nader stumped for a referendum-style voting system where people could trigger new elections by choosing “none of the above” at the polls. Dean dismissed the idea as another of Nader’s turnabouts. “Can you imagine what would have happened in Arkansas if you’d tried to do civil rights by referendum?” he said.

In a refreshingly energetic debate, the two iconoclasts found themselves reverting to politician-speak at the end, when the moderator, Adler, posed what she called her “favorite question”: If diversity in ideas and perspectives is the main recommendation for a strong third-party system, what did the two have to say about the hurdles to women or atheists running for president? “This country is alive and well if they have candidates who stand up” for their principles, Dean said blandly. Nader, in a non sequitur, advocated repeal of the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act, enacted in 1947. (Not a single union has endorsed him.)

“I still haven’t heard about women and atheists,” Adler chided. The fight was over.

Since losing the Democratic nomination, Dean has campaigned as a stalwart for Kerry and created his own activist organization, Democracy for America. He has taken on the mission of protecting from Nader the flock he has shepherded. Unable to offer cogent responses to Dean’s charges, Nader frantically roams the countryside demanding his relevance.

“Now comes the revolution,” Viguerie recently told conservatives, according to the New York Times.

But first, there are still a few ideological outliers to crush. On Thursday, the conservative movement icon was busy helping lead a campaign to block moderate Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., from rotating into the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The cause of the uproar was an Associated Press story that quoted Specter as bluntly warning Bush not to nominate anti-abortion Supreme Court justices.

“When you talk about judges who would change the right of a woman to choose, overturn Roe vs. Wade, I think that is unlikely,” Specter said, according to the AP. Referring to Democratic successes over the past four years in filibustering judicial nominees they deemed too far out of the mainstream on social issues, Specter added: “And I would expect the president to be mindful of the considerations which I am mentioning.”

But with conservatives gunning for him, Specter backed off, issuing a statement Thursday in which he said he had no “litmus test” for Supreme Court and other judicial nominations. “I did not warn the president about anything and was very respectful of his constitutional authority on the appointment of federal judges,” Specter said.

Viguerie, who is the author most recently of “America’s Right Turn: How the Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power,” took a break Thursday from his work blocking Specter’s ascension to the Judiciary chairmanship to talk with Salon.

You were quoted in the New York Times Thursday saying, “The revolution begins now.” But I thought the [conservative] revolution has been going on for a while.

Well, it has; that’s a good observation. But it hasn’t been at the public policy level. The conservatives have been engaged in building the movement for 43 years. Actually, it really started 49 years ago, when Bill Buckley launched the National Review. Morton Blackwell [one of Viguerie's contemporaries and fellow activists] said many years ago that when he first came to Washington he realized that conservatives had never nominated anyone for president. That was our first challenge, and we did that in 1964 [when Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona won the Republican nomination for president]. Then, we needed to nominate and elect somebody, and we did that in 1980 [with Ronald Reagan]. Then our next goal was to nominate, elect and govern. And that’s what we have not yet done. We have not yet governed.

You haven’t? I think that would come as a surprise to many of our readers.

Well, in 1980, [Reagan Chief of Staff] Jim Baker told us, “We must put your issues on the back burner until we get our tax cuts and national defense issues, like rebuilding the military and missile defense. The social issues were always put on the back burner, and they stayed on the back burner for eight years. They certainly did not move forward on our agenda at first. George W. Bush has been a very good president from the social issues and conservative perspective — in many ways more than Ronald Reagan. But now with the whole conservative agenda, it’s time to move forward and implement it.

If we don’t move forward now, what was the purpose of building the movement? We were told under Reagan we couldn’t do this and that because we didn’t have the House or a majority of conservative senators. Now, we’ve got everything. We’ve got a president reelected based on running a conservative agenda. We’re thrilled and pleased. We’ve got a good comfortable [conservative Republican] majority in both houses. Now’s the time to do it.

But you can’t call it a revolution anymore if you’re in power, if you’re the government? Or can you?

It would be [a revolution] in terms of legislation. The time is now to take a very different approach to governing that this town hasn’t seen since the 1930s, when Democrats took control of the White House in the 1932 election [with FDR]. Since then, the big-government establishment has driven the political agenda. They started driving it in the early 1930s, and they pretty much drove the agenda through 1994 [when Republicans seized control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years].

Then things kind of came to a halt. It was difficult for the conservatives to implement a lot of their agenda. [With Bill Clinton's election in 1992] they didn’t have the White House. The president could veto our legislation, as he did. And then, we had slim [conservative] majorities to none in the Senate. Now we have a comfortable margin. And George Bush has a mandate. It’s humorous and amusing to hear people in the media and liberals in the country — and even some Republicans, though not many, just one as a matter of fact — who are saying we’re not going to move on [our conservative agenda].

You’re talking about Arlen Specter?

Yes. And you’ll notice that his staff has been backtracking all day on it. You can’t turn on the television right now without hearing someone talking about the Republicans, saying Bush has an obligation to unify the country. That’s code for “abandon your conservative allies and move to the left.” That’s what they mean by unity: Stop trying to promote a conservative agenda. That’s just what the country needs, one more politician to break his promise hours after he was reelected.

But Bush himself tried in his news conference Thursday to reassure Americans who don’t share his conservative, evangelical Christian view of the world. “I will be your president regardless of your faith,” he said. Is that what you call breaking his promise?

No, I don’t. I find it almost humorous to hear the Democrats and the liberals try to influence the president in that direction. I think they are going to fail.

How will you ensure that Bush keeps his word to religious conservatives?

We’re going to try to put pressure on the elected officials to support the president, help the president enact his agenda. We want to pass a constitutional amendment [banning] same-sex marriages, for the protection of marriage. And we’ll have a grass-roots fire to pressure the congressmen and the senators to support the president.

What is the agenda?

As the president said, we want to make the tax cuts permanent. Two, we want new tax cuts. We want the president to start vetoing spending bills. We want to ratchet down the size of government.

But isn’t the huge increase in government spending and the budget deficit already the fault of Bush and the Republican-led Congress?

He certainly had a big role to play in that, certainly. And we’re going to focus on the conservative agenda, which is to reduce government. I don’t know if we’re going to abolish the [new Medicare] prescription drug benefit, but we’d like to. It’s just an expansion of government. When government grows, individual liberties are reduced. We’d like to see oil and gas exploration increased in the continental United States. We want a constitutional amendment on marriage. We want the culture of life expanded — that was one of the big issues that this election was fought over.

Christians feel there is a war against Christians out there. We would like to make sure that the president, and he’s inclined to do this, understands how there’s an anti-Christian environment in the culture, at the national level, in Hollywood, television, the media generally, a lot of the institutions — legal institutions, educational institutions. We want to change that. People of traditional values have a role to play in the public arena.

But many Americans feel it’s the non-Christians and liberal Christians who are under attack these days. They feel that it’s their rights and beliefs, not those of conservative evangelical Christians, that are under assault and threatened.

No one has to believe [in Jesus Christ]. I’m not forcing them to believe. And if [John] Kerry had been elected, he would have forced his views on abortion — killing babies a minute before they’re born — on the rest of us.

So you want to overturn Roe vs. Wade?

We want judges appointed who will not legislate from the bench.

But isn’t that just code for outlawing abortion?

I don’t know. If Roe vs. Wade is not in the Constitution, I guess you’d have to look at that. We just don’t want judges who impose their personal views.

You want to block Specter, one of the last Senate moderates, from obtaining the Judiciary Committee chairmanship. [The current chairman, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is term-limited as the panel's leader.] Is there any future at all for moderate Republicans in the GOP?

Absolutely. It’s just that the election was fought not on moderate Republican issues but on conservative issues. It was conservatives who made the phone calls and pounded the pavement and turned out the big vote for Bush and the Republicans in Congress. But yeah, sure, unlike [with] the Democrats, there’s a place for moderates in the Republican Party. The Democrats do not tolerate dissent in their party. You have zero chance of having a successful career in national Democratic politics if you’re not pro-abortion and [don't] pass the homosexual litmus test. Not so in the Republican Party. Not only are you welcome, but we put you on TV. We give you platforms to speak out on.

I assume you’re talking about moderates like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who were given prime-time speaking slots at the Republican National Convention. They’re moderates on abortion and stem cell research. But they really seemed just like props in a façade to make the party seem less threatening to the rest of the country. They don’t have any real power in the party, do they?

How are they moderates on stem cell research?

They support it.

That’s not a moderate position.

Lots of Republicans support stem cell research — for example, Nancy Reagan. By definition that’s a moderate position.

Yeah, but the election was fought out on the president’s position on stem cell research. [Bush opposes it because it involves the destruction of human embryos.]

Is there any future for people who believe in abortion rights and stem cell research in the Republican Party?

Oh, absolutely. If they believe in a pro-abortion position, well, we’re not going to accommodate it. Absolutely not. But we do welcome them in the party, and they have made some welcome contributions. To the extent they support lower taxes, a fiscally sound government and a strong national defense — absolutely we welcome them.

You accept moderates as long as they abandon the very positions that define them as moderates? That sounds like your own kind of litmus test.

I remind you that it was conservative issues that won this election. And George Bush, on matters of principle, why, 40 hours after the polls close, should he abandon us? It would be dishonest.

How did you feel when you learned Bush had won?

Ecstatic. This is a quantum leap forward. I’ve been working at this for 43 years. And we’ve made an enormous amount of progress. For the first time since Calvin Coolidge a Republican president has won reelection while gaining seats in the House and Senate. It’s historic, and he did it running on a conservative agenda.

So what about the 49 percent of Americans who didn’t vote for Bush and don’t agree with this agenda? Too bad? Their views aren’t relevant?

First of all, it was 48 percent. Well, yeah, their views are relevant. We’d love to have them support a fiscally sound government and a strong national defense against the forces of evil out there. And this is a pluralistic society, and conservatives are going to have to compromise.

Bush will likely get the chance to make as many as three Supreme Court appointments. Do you think a staunchly anti-abortion judge can make it through the confirmation process?

We’re not looking for a pro-life judge. We’re looking for a judge who will interpret the Constitution and not put his thoughts or views before those of the legislature’s. That’s all we’re looking for.

Again, that sounds to me like code for overturning Roe vs. Wade.

Well, that’s up to you all to say.

Spoken like a politician!

I don’t know if that’s a compliment at all. But listen, I’ve got another conference call. I’ve got to go.

Two jowly men at the bar, watching the TV and hunched over what looked like or Scotch or another whiskey, also brushed me away. Dressed like lobbyists in expensive shirts and suspenders, they shook their heads emphatically: No, they did not want to talk. No, they would not say if they were Republican. No. Go away.

The scene was much the same in another part of town, at the Palm restaurant near Dupont Circle. Except here, at this famed hangout for political types, lobbyists and journalists, the patrons were more bipartisan. The Democrats were chatty. The Republicans — on learning that I was a reporter seeking reaction to the exit polls — fled. Literally.

“You might want to record that,” said a laughing Greg Schneiders, a Democrat and partner in a polling firm, when the three Republicans he was sitting with abruptly left the table upon my approach. “They ran for the hills!” Schneiders exclaimed.

Director of speechwriting in the Carter White House and a former press secretary to now-retired Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, Schneiders leaned back and pointed to a table that had been occupied when I came into the restaurant. It was also suddenly empty. “They left, too,” he said, chuckling about the quick exit of a group that had included former Republican National Committee Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf.

Every four years for the past 16 years, Schneiders has convened a bipartisan group of friends at the Palm to watch the presidential election results. By late afternoon, as the red wine flowed, the Democrats at his table were increasingly giddy. Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University, said she was beginning to believe that Kerry might actually win. Ben Goddard, who owns an issue advocacy firm, said that the exit poll numbers reflected angst among young people, who were voting out of fear that George W. Bush’s policies would lead to a resurrection of the draft. “Talk to anyone in this restaurant, and they’ll say, ‘Impossible! There’s not going to be a draft.’ But that’s Washington for you. Go online and you’ll see a lot of people feel that there is,” Goddard said.

At that point, one of the stricken Republicans from Schneiders’ group returned. “I just had to use the bathroom!” the young man insisted. And he may have been telling the truth: 28-year-old Wen-Tsing Choi, who works at a polling firm, was the only Republican in the bar to give me his name. “Well, exit polls are not always right,” Choi said tentatively. “I’m still hoping. But some of those numbers are pretty wide.” Asked if he was surprised at how strong Kerry was appearing, Choi said, “A little bit surprised, yes.”

One of the other Republicans — a man everyone called Scott — bounded back to the table holding his Palm Pilot aloft. “Look what Drudge has! Those early numbers were based on a 59-41 [percent] female-male split! I knew it! How else would you get a 17 percent spread in New Hampshire [for Kerry], which is a bunch of crap.” But no one else seemed too excited about the conservative-leaning Drudge Report’s unsourced “scoop” that the exit polls were weighted toward women, who tend to support Democrats over Republicans. Scott shrugged. “Well, I’m must reading from Drudge,” he said.

For the second time, I asked if he’d give me his name and an interview. And once again, he just shook his head.

“A couple of days ago, I thought George Bush was more likely than not to be reelected, based on the public polling I had seen,” said Petrocik, who was a consultant to George H.W. Bush and is the author of the award-winning 1976 book “The Changing American Voter.” Now, he said, “I’m not sure any of us know.”

Petrocik said his doubt is driven by the methodology pollsters use to determine who is a likely voter — and thus who should be interviewed. “You can figure out who the nonvoters are, but you can’t easily figure out who the likely voters are. And so pollsters can wind up identifying a lot of people as voters who turn out not to be voters,” he said.

Poll respondents who don’t indicate by their answers that they are likely to vote are not interviewed further, and their opinions are not registered. But the questions and methods used to screen out the likely nonvoters are treated by most pollsters as inviolable trade secrets. “Pollsters generate a set of propositions about who is most likely to vote, and they develop an algorithm to decide who they want to interview. And they ask us to take it on faith” that they’ve done it right, Petrocik said. Moreover, “weighting” polls to account for voter preferences that a pollster doesn’t believe were adequately represented in a polling sample is another extremely subjective method, he said.

John Kerry partisans, meanwhile, should not invest too much hope in polls that show blocs of undecided voters in some battleground states, Petrocik warned. The conventional wisdom that undecided voters break for challengers because they represent change is not borne out by the data. “There’s no evidence of that at all,” Petrocik said. “In fact, the evidence that we have on that is 1) they [undecided voters] don’t vote; 2) if they vote, they split 50-50 between the candidates; or 3) if there’s a runaway candidate, they support the runaway.”

Thus, the polls are as difficult to follow this year as toddlers in a moon bounce. In Florida, for example, where 27 electoral votes are at stake, the numbers are on a roller coaster. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll has Kerry up by three points among likely voters, a Strategic Vision poll has Bush up by three, and a Zogby International survey has the race tied.

Petrocik said he is not privy to the daily tracking polls the Bush campaign is taking in battleground states. But he said that in a year marked by high passion, huge numbers of newly registered voters and intense get-out-the-vote efforts, the election is about turnout, not poll numbers.

“I have no prediction,” he said. “I can tell you different ways of doing it [crunching data] that show a Bush win. But do it another way, and it shows Kerry winning. I think the reasonable thing to say is that everyone promised us a close election, and we’ve gotten it.”

Colorado: The results of a Zogby International poll look good for Democratic state attorney general Ken Salazar, who leads Republican beer magnate Pete Coors, 52 to 44 percent. Factor in the 4.1 percent margin of error, though, and the outcome is still uncertain. Salazar appears to be feeling confident; he has been invoking John Kerry’s name in campaign appearances — trying to extend his coattails, it seems, to his party’s presidential ticket. Coors stumped today with Vice President Dick Cheney in the battleground state, their second joint appearance in nine days. A Salazar win would add a Senate seat for the Democrats. Republican Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell is retiring.

Florida: A new CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll has the Democrat, former University of South Florida president Betty Castor, up 2 points over Karl Rove’s handpicked candidate, former Housing and Urban Development secretary Mel Martinez. But a poll by Republican firm Strategic Vision has Martinez up by 4. The most likely scenario is Zogby International’s analysis: dead even at 46 percent each, with 7 percent undecided. Castor campaigned Monday with John Edwards, retiring Democratic Sen. Bob Graham and singer Jimmy Buffett. After appearing at rallies on Sunday with President Bush, Martinez is campaigning Monday with Gov. Jeb Bush and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Kentucky: His campaign floundering, Republican Sen. Jim Bunning appeared briefly on Sunday with President Bush and Laura Bush as they headed for a rally in Cincinnati, in the neighboring battleground state of Ohio. Bush praised Bunning, and the 73-year-old senator again told reporters that rumors of his mental incompetence were malicious lies spread by his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Daniel Mongiardo. Bunning campaign spokesman David Young stressed the “Bush-Bunning team,” while new Democratic Party star Barack Obama stumped for Mongiardo, who has denounced attempts by Bunning’s surrogates in recent days to insinuate that he is gay. Illinois’ Obama is expected to sail to victory in his own Senate race on Tuesday — snatching a GOP seat for the Democrats.

Louisiana: The big question here is whether Republican Rep. David Vitter can pull at least 50 percent of the vote in the state’s all-party election and avoid a runoff. Until recently, he appeared headed for a straight-out victory on Tuesday. But pollster Verne Kennedy told the Lafayette Daily Advertiser Monday that an ad Vitter started running in north Louisiana implying that Democrats will let U.N. troops take over Louisiana elections appeared to have damaged the Republican, especially among women. The ad shows the lowering of the American flag as a rattled woman is escorted into a polling place. “Vitter has lost support in North Louisiana, and I understand that’s where the ad was run. I don’t know why [else] that would have happened,” Kennedy told the newspaper.

Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Chris John — battling for second place against fellow Democrat John Kennedy, the state treasurer — is gaining support among African-American voters. Kennedy angrily accused John of mailing a pamphlet to black voters calling him a segregationist.

North Carolina: The race to succeed Sen. Edwards remains a dead heat. The candidates are former Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, the Democrat, and Rep. Richard Burr, the Republican.

Oklahoma: Again, dueling polls have produced a murky picture in this conservative state, where Democrats believe they have an unusually good chance to pick up the Republican seat held by retiring Sen. Don Nickles. A survey by GOP firm Soonerpoll.com has former Republican Rep. Tom Coburn with 44 percent, compared with 35 percent for Democrat Brad Carson, a congressman. When the 4.4 percent margin of error is factored in, this poll has the race still up for grabs. CapAd Communications, a Democratic firm, has the race tied at 43 percent each. Coburn’s many gaffes have put the state in play for the Democrats. Over the weekend, Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe demanded an investigation into what he called voter intimidation by the pro-Carson Cherokee Nation. Carson, a former Rhodes Scholar, is part Cherokee.

South Dakota: Knocking off Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle has been a top GOP priority. Former Republican Rep. John Thune has nipped uncomfortably close with an aggressive, pro-Bush campaign in the increasingly Republican state. But a flier he recently distributed in western South Dakota that seemed to equate Indians with “varmints” and “prairie dogs” has created a “groundswell of resentment” among the Native American population, the newspaper Indian Country Today reported.

This is the paradox for Tenenbaum, a soft-spoken former attorney and elementary school teacher who is about as conservative as a Democrat can be. She is for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. She supports the war in Iraq. And she is in favor of the death penalty. But the question is whether even that is enough to carry South Carolina, a veterans-heavy state in the heart of the religious conservative South that voted 57 percent for George W. Bush in 2000.

Polls indicate a slight advantage for Tenenbaum’s Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Jim DeMint, who has squandered a once-commanding lead with blunder after blunder. After shaking up her campaign staff in August, Tenenbaum hoped to capitalize on DeMint’s missteps, including his assertion that gays and unmarried single mothers should not be allowed to teach in South Carolina’s public schools.

Pounding DeMint for his support of a 23 percent federal sales tax, she has pulled tantalizingly close in the polls, buoyed by $3 million in anti-DeMint ads paid for by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington. “It’s a tight race, and it’s going to turn on who gets the vote out,” said Jack Bass, a professor of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston and coauthor of “The Transformation of Southern Politics: Social Change and Political Consequence Since 1945.” Predictions? “I wouldn’t make any,” Bass said.

In a state where some upscale gyms offer separate workout areas for women uncomfortable with sweating in front of men, Tenenbaum scores points with her polite and feminine manner. Slim and elegant at 53, her dark hair neatly coifed, she has not let DeMint’s television ads linking her to conservative bêtes noires Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., go unanswered. In a response ad, she looks into the camera, wrinkles her nose and says, “Ted Kennedy? Hillary Clinton? Can’t Jim DeMint do any better than that?”

At the same time, though, Tenenbaum has been running her own unsparing attack ads, pounding DeMint on what she calls his support for “disturbing” ideas, including free trade with China, which has cost South Carolina thousands of textile jobs, and privatizing part of Social Security. Between them, DeMint and Tenenbaum have been running one of the most negative and harsh campaigns in recent South Carolina memory.

In a recent debate, DeMint repeatedly invoked John Kerry’s name in an effort to tar Tenenbaum as a liberal. At the same time, the three-term congressman has tried to grab the president’s coattails, running effective television ads showing Bush heaping praise on him. Tenenbaum, trying to dodge the fatal L-word, has distanced herself from the Democratic ticket — she dropped in on the Democratic National Convention in Boston in August only briefly. “I’ll always take an independent approach,” she says in one of her television ads, “and I’ll never have any agenda other than what’s best for South Carolina.”

Meantime, she has downplayed her support of abortion rights, making no mention of it on her campaign Web site, aware that it puts her out of step in the Palmetto State. But the price of running a right-of-center campaign may be the Democratic-leaning African-American vote in a state where blacks are nearly 30 percent of the population.

“There’s not a great deal of enthusiasm for Tenenbaum in the black community because she’s running a centrist campaign,” said one close observer of South Carolina politics, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject. “It’s a delicate situation for her. Meanwhile, there’s a small portion of the black community that is more for Bush and for her opponent [DeMint] this year than you’d expect, because they’re both fundamentalist Christians, as are a lot of black voters.” The GOP has made inroads among religiously conservative blacks with its wedge-issue campaign against gay marriage, this observer added.

But DeMint received bad publicity from his joint appearance with Tenenbaum on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Oct. 17. Host Tim Russert pounded him about his statement that gays and unmarried mothers should not teach in public schools. It was the kind of intolerant position that could turn off a growing but not yet decisive population of non-native South Carolinians who have moved to the state in recent years — Northern retirees here for the mild weather and low housing prices and workers attracted to the Grand Strand tourist area around Myrtle Beach.

DeMint’s evasive answer to Russert — he apologized not for his statement but for “distracting” voters from the real issues — was panned by South Carolina’s premier political commentator. “The U.S. Senate race is Jim DeMint’s to lose,” Lee Bandy wrote in the State newspaper, adding: “DeMint seems to be doing all he can to lose it.” Bandy quoted Francis Marion University political scientist Neal Thigpen, a GOP activist, characterizing DeMint’s campaign as an “amateur hour.”

Still, the embarrassing DeMint may muddle through. A McLaughlin & Associates poll conducted Oct. 24-27 showed the Republican leading 46 percent to 38 percent, with a margin of error of 4.6 percent. The survey reinforced the results of a Mason-Dixon poll, conducted Oct. 19-20 for Charleston’s Post and Courier, that put DeMint at 47 percent and Tenenbaum at 43 percent, just within the margin of error, unusually close for conservative South Carolina.