Attend an OWS protest? Blog about it on Open Salon. As the demonstrations continue, we'll feature more posts and images from Open Salon bloggers to complement our nationwide coverage of the events.

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Here is how Barack Obama should address Wright's latest comments:

"When I announced my candidacy, I said that Americans were tired of the old politics of division and blame. In the last few days, I have reluctantly been forced to conclude that Rev. Wright's views, and the ways he expresses them, are part of the negative politics that our country needs to transcend. They were forged in our past; they sometimes played a decisive and positive role in our past, but they are not part of the positive future I see. I'm not running for president to lead America back to an era that pits interest against interest, or group against group. I want to lead America forward -- to a common ground, a higher ground. This is not the time to reopen old wounds; it's a time for healing. Rev. Wright is passionate about injustice, and so am I. Rev. Wright has the right to express himself loudly and clearly. But so do I. And anyone who confuses his message with mine fails to understand my message of hope and my promise of reconciliation."

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Will President Bush reach out across the aisle and pick a candidate who enjoys broad Democratic support? That nominee would be easily confirmed. But if he nominates a candidate whose record suggests that the court would move in a more radical direction, far from the mainstream and jeopardizing the progress America's made, then I anticipate a fierce battle.

The Alliance for Justice is extremely concerned that, given his track record, President Bush will nominate a judge hostile to women's rights, the environment and consumer protection.

Choosing a Supreme Court justice is the most important act of a president. All the nation will look to the White House to see what President Bush will do. We urge him to do what his predecessors in the White House have done -- nominate a consensus candidate with the support of the other party. In so doing his nominee would sail through confirmation, benefiting both his party and the country for decades to come.

If he names a candidate who would shift the ideological balance of the court, putting individual rights in jeopardy, we anticipate that [these] extraordinary circumstances would justify a defeat.

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Felt was one of a dozen people who had access to information that the White House was lying. I'd like each of those people to ask themselves why they weren't Deep Throat, how they justified not sharing that information with the world. We desperately need more Mark Felts right now, and we needed them back in 1964. He played an important part in holding the government accountable, and should receive an honorary Nobel Prize. At the same time, I think he has lots more to tell, and I hope he tells it.

Stanley Kutler, author of "Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Oval Office Tapes"

Felt provided the FBI raw field reports and other information in the first days following the break-in. We long have suspected this. But through the life of the controversy, others provided ample information to the Senate Select Committee, the U.S. attorney, the House Judiciary Committee, and the special prosecutor. We owe enormous thanks to Felt for providing the essential first information. Richard Nixon tried to subvert the FBI and Felt simply would not allow him to do so.

Sean Wilentz, professor of history, Princeton University

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To succeed in November, President Bush must both mobilize his base and engage nontraditional voters by putting a big, bold idea on the table. That is what Ronald Reagan did in 1980 with income tax cuts, and it is what Republicans did in 1994 with the Contract With America, when we won a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. Both were historic victories won by campaigning on big, bold ideas that attracted millions of new voters to the process.

It's time for the next wave of bold ideas. There is a big idea out there that will energize the base and bring new voters to the polls in November: reforming Social Security by creating personal retirement accounts, which would allow workers to invest a large portion of their Social Security tax dollars into individual accounts that they own and control. This idea is popular because it frees future generations from relying on the whim of congressional promises for their retirement, and it solves the looming Social Security unfunded liability crisis. It's also a way to let Americans at all income levels begin to build real wealth -- and personal accounts are especially popular with younger voters.

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Compiled by Salon staff

July 26, 2004  | 

Thomas Frank, author of "What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America"

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I deal here only with what Kerry should say in the election, not with what he should do as president, which is a very different subject. In the campaign, he must deal above all with the threat of al-Qaida and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. First, he has to counter the impression -- particularly among white, working-class voters -- that Republicans are tougher and better prepared to protect America from foreign attack. He needs to tout his war record, criticize the Bush administration's failure to make Americans more secure, and promise to get the terrorists that have eluded Bush. He's been pretty good on doing this.

Secondly, he has to convince voters that he will deal with them straightforwardly and honestly on foreign policy -- and conversely that Bush has not. It is very important for the Kerry campaign to remind voters that Bush exaggerated or lied about the threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its ties with al-Qaida. The campaign, if not Kerry himself, has to shake voters' trust in the president as a leader. So far Kerry and his campaign have not been very good at this for reasons I don't entirely understand.

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Sen. Lott has made the right decision. But his resignation as majority leader should signal the beginning of the Republican Party's work on race, not the end.

There were many disgraceful incidents of minority voter intimidation in the '02 elections, particularly in the Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and New Jersey Senate campaigns. It is disturbing that the senator who ran these races as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Sen. Bill Frist, is now a leading candidate for Senate majority leader.

What did Sen. Frist know about fliers distributed in Louisiana's African-American communities encouraging voters to cast their ballot "on Tuesday, December 10th" -- five days after the Dec. 5 runoff? Did the NRSC direct the Louisiana Republican Party to pay African-American youth $75 to hold signs in black neighborhoods that read: "Mary, if you don't respect us, don't expect us?" Was it part of the NRSC's ground game to have paid employees of Sen. Tim Hutchinson, D-Ark., intimidate African-American voters at early-voting polling locations?

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For the first time in his public life, George W. Bush gave a speech in which expectations were high. He failed to live up to them.

He generally set the right tone on the war. While not up to the boffo performance of Sept. 20, he told us the hard truth about al-Qaida: Despite our victory in Afghanistan, there are tens of thousands of "ticking time bombs" all around the world.

But on the domestic front, Bush didn't look, act or sound like a president with an 82 percent approval rating. He glanced over the deficit, never even mentioned campaign reform and didn't propose anything his father wasn't for back when the old man was at 91 percent.

W. will soon present a budget that will open him up to charges of Enron Economics -- cooking the books, lying about the numbers, rewarding a favored few and screwing all the rest. The fact that he hardly mentioned Enron at all -- and then to hypocritically call for corporate disclosure even as his own White House is covering up important documents sought by Congressional investigators -- tells this old scandal veteran that there's a lot he doesn't want us to know about the Bush-Enron relationship. If only the Democrats have the courage to smoke him out.

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Some say Helms' departure is a golden opportunity for Republicans to create a more tolerant image for the party. Speculation has alrady begun that Helms' retirement could make a U.S. senator out of Elizabeth Dole. Salon spoke to a group of activists, writers and politicians to get their reactions to the news and the potential fallout.

Pioneer feminist and Ms. magazine co-founder Gloria Steinem

We should have been able to retire him much earlier. He never represented the majority of opinion in his state, only those with enough ability to go to the polls.

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Sean Wilentz is Dayton-Stockton professor of history at Princeton University and a contributing editor to the New Republic.

We're in a constitutional crisis and it's anybody's guess as to how it's going to be resolved. Unless there can be absolute certainty that the result in Florida was not only fair and accurate, but also untainted, then we've got a problem. The question is how legitimate will the vote in Florida be?

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Dear Mr. Nader:

Over the years, you have accomplished a great deal for the American people. Your candidacy in this election has been important. You have raised serious issues that need to be addressed.

However, the time has come to forego ideology and self-interest and step aside. You need to reconsider the consequences of your campaign. If you do not, you will ensure that George W. Bush is the next United States president. You are focusing your campaign in crucial states such as Michigan, Minnesota and Oregon, where, if converted to you, Al Gore supporters will give the state to Bush with disastrous consequences for the future of this nation.

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As predicted at the time Al Gore was still tarring Bill Bradley as a racist, and a year before his surrogates began floating rumors that Ralph Nader was gay, the Political Murder Inc. operating out of Nashville under Gore directives is now making the final run of this presidential campaign the ugliest and bloodiest in memory.

Gore has already accused George W. Bush of killing elderly nursing home patients in Texas and running a scam on vulnerable seniors that would strip them of their Social Security benefits; at the same time he has encouraged his Democratic, race-baiting friends at the NAACP in their disgusting ad campaign to smear Bush with the lynching of James Byrd. ("It was as though my father was killed a second time.") In this context, yesterday's surfacing of a 24-year-old DUI arrest by Democratic Party activists is pretty tepid stuff. It will affect the polls adversely for a day and be forgotten.

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Was there still too much pepper in Gore's punch? Or did Bush squander the gains he made in the second round? For Salon's presidential debate panel, it was a split decision.

Todd Gitlin, professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University

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That civility may not be to Gore's benefit. Any corrective action he took to overcome his pit bull image after the last debate or any points he scored during Wednesday night's discussion of Texas healthcare were counterbalanced by Bush's ability to hold his own in a 45-minute discussion on foreign policy. By agreeing with most of the vice president's positions, Bush may have helped put to rest the Gore campaign's sharpest critique -- that Bush simply isn't presidential timber. Even Gore loyalists conceded that Bush's performance was a step up from last week.

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I'm not surprised with what happened to
John McCain when he started winning and
I'm not surprised with what happened
after. If it was all truly up to the
people, it would most certainly have
been McCain and it might even have been
Bradley who won. But it was already
locked in before time by the parties.
And, in truth, there are groups of
people, union people, churchgoers,
people who belong to things. There are
more of those people than most New
Yorkers realize, and they all vote
together.

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Ed Rollins, Republican political consultant

Virginia is a tough state. McCain, I think, truly is a man of bravery, and made a deliberate decision there to really draw the line with the [Christian conservatives]. It didn't help him, and I think the final votes in Virginia showed it might have kept it from being close. But it was an act of bravery. Anybody could have said those things in a state that didn't matter. He said them in a state that did matter.

But the problem with McCain is that he's in a war of attrition. Even though he's had a good run and surprised a lot of people, my sense is that after Super Tuesday, it's going to be pretty clearly Bush's nomination. McCain is a very competitive guy, and I personally think he would be a stronger candidate in the final election. But look, Bush has the whole party operation behind him. It's like George Bush's battle for the nomination in 1988, when two out of three primary voters were not happy with Bush as the candidate and were looking for an alternative. Dole, Kemp and Robertson were suddenly in there. But Bush was able to bring the party base around to him -- he was helped of course by a lot of residual Reagan supporters -- and he won the nomination and the election.

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