‘Our Job Is Not Finished,’ President Tells Gulf Coast

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — President Obama on Saturday called the capping of the well that has spewed tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico “an important milestone,” but vowed to maintain an intense government response until the environment is cleaned up and businesses and communities are made whole.

“Today, the well is capped, oil is no longer flowing into the gulf, and it has not been flowing for a month,” Mr. Obama said at a Coast Guard district station here, with cutters behind him and his wife, Michelle. “But I’m here to tell you that our job is not finished, and we are not going anywhere until it is.”

The Obamas and their daughter Sasha — their older daughter, Malia, is away at camp — arrived here on Saturday morning, along with their dog, Bo, for a one-night stay in a summer in which their leisure pursuits have kicked up national confusion over what is appropriate for an American president and his family.

The trip, intended by the White House to spotlight the oil-stricken Gulf Coast as a recreational venue, was planned after Mr. Obama and his wife urged Americans to vacation here, only to make their own vacation plans for Maine and Martha’s Vineyard.

(And that was before Mrs. Obama and Sasha jetted off to the coast of Spain for a mother-daughter trip that has been criticized as too luxurious during a recession.)

Perhaps metaphorically for a president who has been through a rough patch, the skies here were gray and rainy when Air Force One landed — not an especially appealing backdrop for Mr. Obama, who had intended to encourage vacationers to sample the gulf seafood and beaches. But by the time the president spoke, the sun had broken through, and he made his pitch.

“Beaches all along the Gulf Coast are clean, safe and open for business,” Mr. Obama said. He said he wanted to let “fellow Americans know that they should come on down here,” adding, “Not just to support the region, but also because it’s a beautiful place to visit.”

For the president, and to a lesser extent for Mrs. Obama, the trip is a working vacation. As soon as Air Force One touched down Saturday morning, the first couple went to the Coast Guard headquarters for a round-table discussion with local business leaders and government officials, including a hotel owner and a fishing boat captain who spoke of declining revenues in the months since the spill.

“I’m going to spend most of my time, Michelle is going to spend most of her time, listening and getting suggestions and recommendations from you,” the president told them.

The trip was a somewhat delicate one for Mr. Obama. Although he wants to take credit for the government response and the capping of the well, he can ill afford to declare “mission accomplished.” In his remarks, the president vowed to maintain the government’s focus on removing any oil that might surface; testing fisheries and reopening waters for fishing as soon as tests show they are safe; leaning on BP to quickly process claims; and developing a long-term restoration plan for the gulf.

The brief speech concluded the working portion of the trip; the big question on Saturday morning here was what the Obamas would do for fun. In the afternoon, the family had lunch at Lime’s Bayside Bar & Grill at the end of a long pier. Later they played miniature golf.

But Mr. Obama faced a presidential dilemma: whether to go swimming. To stay out of the water would have suggested it was unsafe, undercutting the message of his trip. To take the plunge might have resulted in photographs of him shirtless, causing a controversy like the one that dogged him in 2008 after he went bodysurfing in Hawaii.

The White House solved the problem by allowing only its own photographer to take pictures of the president swimming. The photo it released showed Mr. Obama enjoying the surf — from the neck up.

The Panama City visit is short, planned for just 27 hours; the family expected to return to Washington on Sunday evening, and on Monday Mr. Obama will set off for a three-day cross-country fund-raising swing.

When he returns, he will head to Massachusetts for his real vacation: 10 days on Martha’s Vineyard.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/us/politics/15obama.html?ref=us

Yankees Pull Further and Further Away

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The first baseball landed deep into the left-field stands, but that was only the beginning. The next one caromed off a concrete wall beneath the batter’s eye, and the third one shot off Alex Rodriguez’s bat with such authority and conviction that the Royals’ left fielder, Alex Gordon, did not even look up to follow the flight path as it soared above a waterfall and into a section of Kauffman Stadium previously deemed safe for human occupation.

Rodriguez homered in his final three at-bats in the Yankees’ 8-3 victory against the Kansas City Royals, each one traveling farther than the one before. As a team, the Yankees belted five home runs, totaling an estimated 2,074 feet — nearly four-tenths of a mile — and Rodriguez’s blasts accounted for 1,270. The other two, back-to-back shots by Jorge Posada and Curtis Granderson, settled in the Royals’ bullpen and onto a staircase beyond a center-field plaza, and still they could not compare with the majesty of the ones hit by Rodriguez, who now has 604 in his career.

“It’s a night I’ll never forget,” said Rodriguez, whose barrage helped the Yankees maintain a two-game lead in the American League East over the Tampa Bay Rays. “You just don’t do things like that very often in a career. For me, it was nice to carry the team for one night. These guys have been carrying me all year.”

Rodriguez increased his season total to 21, a respectable figure for most players, but probably a disappointment for someone like him. He endured a homerless streak of 46 at-bats before hitting No. 600 on Aug. 4, but now has four homers in his last 22 at-bats.

It was his first three-homer game since April 26, 2005, when he tormented Bartolo Colon on his way to driving in 10 runs. Rodriguez settled for five runs batted in Saturday, running his season total to 97, tops in the major leagues.

“I haven’t hit for any power this year, so it’s been frustrating,” said Rodriguez, who throughout the season has repeatedly expressed thoughts to the contrary. “Being stuck at 599 was really a microcosm of what’s happened all year. I’ve been able to drive in runs and hit some doubles here and there, but over all I’ve hit for no power.”

Of Rodriguez’s three homers, the second — which gave the Yankees a 6-3 lead in the seventh — is what delighted Phil Hughes. An inning earlier, Hughes, who allowed nine hits in fulfilling the minimum standards for a quality start — six innings, three runs — had averted potential disaster.

After Rodriguez, Posada and Granderson mashed home runs off Sean O’Sullivan to put the Yankees ahead, 4-1, in the top of the sixth, Hughes opened the bottom of the inning by surrendering a homer to Wilson Betemit. Then came a sequence that tested Hughes’s patience: an infield single, a blooper and a ball that Brett Gardner lost when it went above the top of the stadium.

“I hoped it would reappear,” Gardner said. “It never did.”

The Royals had the bases loaded with no outs, but a shallow flyout to Gardner and two unassisted plays at first base by Mark Teixeira, who thwarted grounders all night, silenced the rally.

“Sometimes, you feel like things are unraveling right in front of you — it’s tough,” Hughes said. “Bases loaded, nobody out, what are you going to do? You just have to try to get out of it the best you can. I didn’t make the best pitches, but I got out of it without too many runs scoring.”

Hughes gave way to a relief corps that is doing its best pitching of the season. Four relievers combined to allow one hit over three scoreless innings. Over the last 10 games — a stretch of 27 innings — the Yankees’ bullpen has given up one run. Over the last 15 games, the bullpen has a 0.92 earned run average.

Before the first two games here, Rodriguez worked with the hitting coach Kevin Long on clearing his hips in his swing — that is, allowing himself to be in the best position to attack the ball with power.

His three home runs came against three pitchers, including Kanekoa Texeira, who throws nasty sinkers in the mid-90-mile-per-hour range.

Texeira seemed surprised that Rodriguez was able to pummel the first pitch, a low, 94-m.p.h. fastball that probably would not have been called a strike. No one will ever know.

“Why can’t he do that every time when I’m pitching?” Hughes said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/sports/baseball/15yankees.html?ref=sports

New Stress Added to the Heart of Los Angeles Gridlock

LOS ANGELES — The intersection of Interstate 405 and Sunset Boulevard, cutting through a prosperous stretch of rolling Los Angeles hills and estates, is notorious for its knots of traffic and frustrating delays. Traffic is so bad that it is hard to figure out how it could get any worse.

Well, a $1.3 billion highway reconstruction project that began with a blizzard of alarming detour signs the other day is about to make it much worse. And that has put a large part of this city on edge.

The goal would appear simple and even admirable: to add a 10-mile car-pool lane on the 405, among the most reviled and traffic-snarled freeways in Los Angeles, as it approaches and rolls north over the Sepulveda Pass, connecting the city’s west side to the San Fernando Valley. But given the nature of this particular operation — basically open-heart surgery on the central circulatory system of this traffic-obsessed town — it is anything but.

What looms is an alleged three-year marathon of open and closed exit ramps, shut and narrowed lanes, banging overnight construction, detours sending traffic rumbling through some of the city’s most elegant neighborhoods, and a reminder of the price paid for the absence of meaningful public transit. It is all being chronicled in a stream of e-mail alerts and Twitter postings from transportation officials, who are doing what they can to keep everyone calm — with mixed success.

“It’s going to last for three years, but it’s going to take 23 years off my life,” said Jake Lawson, a 40-year-old actor who lives in the San Fernando Valley and now adds an hour to his regular trips to Santa Monica for acting auditions. “I’ve begun turning to my favorite radio station, contemporary Christian, so I can pray to the good Lord to just let me get through this as I’m sitting in traffic for three hours.”

There is nothing unusual about people in Los Angeles complaining about traffic (it is not as if they would dare complain about the weather). But this construction project has an unusually broad reach, creating not one but two very distinct problems.

It is making the already impossible 405 even more impossible, creating headaches for north-south commuters all along the west side of Los Angeles, from the San Fernando Valley to the South Bay beach towns, not to mention anyone trying to get to the Los Angeles airport, U.C.L.A. or the Getty Museum. An estimated 300,000 vehicles use the 405 to cross the Sepulveda Pass every day. (As is the case with most highways in Southern California, this one is referred to simply as “the 405,” rather than “Interstate 405” as it would be called in most other states.)

And it is narrowing, and at times closing, three bridges that carry surface streets over the 405, most significantly, the Sunset Boulevard bridge. An e-mail “notice of night construction” from the project managers on Wednesday informed residents that for six days this week, “Sunset Bridge may be intermittently closed between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. for equipment delivery.”

Sunset is the only remotely convenient way to travel from the exclusive part of town east of the 405 that includes communities like Bel Air and Beverly Hills to the similarly exclusive part of town west of the 405 that includes Brentwood, Pacific Palisades and, eventually, Malibu.

And it is not just commuters. Private elementary schools are considering how they are going to get school buses across another bridge on Mulholland Drive over Interstate 405 (sorry, the 405) in time for morning classes. Supporters of the Getty Museum are worried that visitors will find another museum to visit during the construction snarls.

Businesses anywhere near the 405 are understandably worried. “I was very concerned about what was going on, given the scope and closure,” said Reginald Archambault, general manager of the Luxe Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. “But I have to say that so far, it has been less impactful than we had feared, knock on wood.”

And in a city where social cachet comes from knowing the latest surface-street shortcut, once isolated and peaceful neighborhoods are enduring an influx of vehicles searching for some new way to get home or to work.

Debbie Nussbaum, who lives in Westwood Hills — basically, ground zero for this project — said a driver lost in her neighborhood the other day went winging by at an excessive speed, clipped a bumper on a parked car and flipped over. Ms. Nussbaum said the woman had to be cut from the wreckage, but declined medical treatment and asked only for help in escaping the neighborhood and getting home.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/us/15freeway.html?ref=us

With Keepers Obsolete, Lighthouse Duties Fall to New Set of Stewards

ST. HELENA ISLAND, Mich. — MaryAnn Moore and Pan Godchaux had eager smiles and the to-do list ready when their guests arrived for a four-day stay. “Sweep sidewalks and dock,” it said. “Wash tower windows. Pump water.”

And for anyone feeling really generous, two big requests were scrawled on a kitchen whiteboard: a boat “that doesn’t leak” and “$1,000,000.”

The women are keepers of a lighthouse, nine miles from the nearest town, on an uninhabited island at the treacherous convergence of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. For more than 10 years, volunteer keepers have worked to restore the 137-year-old station, and in the summer they count on vacationing friends and preservation-minded Michiganders to pitch in.

“We want to build ownership and for people to feel like, ‘This is our lighthouse,’ ” said Ms. Moore, 63, a former teacher and full-time volunteer with the Great Lakes Lighthouse Keepers Association, a nonprofit group. “I want to do what it takes to keep it alive.”

It takes a lot.

As GPS units and the automation of navigational tools have rendered traditional lighthouse keepers obsolete, the government has been decommissioning the properties it owns, nearly 50 over the last 10 years, and transferring ownership to new stewards at no cost, preferably nonprofit groups. When it cannot find a proper caretaker, the properties are auctioned to the highest bidder, which has happened 15 times.

Increasingly, people like Ms. Moore — history buffs and preservationists, youth groups and investors — are stepping up to do what the Coast Guard and old men of the sea have done for ages: tend to the nation’s lighthouses.

Three were declared excess just last month in Michigan. There are seven available in Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin, and five more are up for auction.

The catch is that new owners must maintain the properties to historic standards. And during a recession, with grants and donations ever harder to come by, the lighthouses have hit hard times, particularly in Michigan, a struggling state with about 113 lighthouses — more than any other state.

“I’m telling you this, you cannot restore a lighthouse with bake sales,” said Scott L. Hollman, 69, who won the Granite Island Light Station in Lake Superior at public auction for $86,000 about 10 years ago, somewhat unaware of what he was getting into. “I can never get over the fact that they built this whole darn thing in one summer, and it took me two-and-a-half summers to repair it, with all the materials and technology we have today.”

Restoring a lighthouse is not easy. Just after Mr. Hollman installed a custom-designed door, high winds blew through and shredded it. It took months to make a new one. “That little storm cost me 2,500 bucks,” he said. “You want to do these things once and say it is restored and done. In fact, you do things over and over again.”

Lighthouses even have their budding collectors. Michael L. Gabriel, 56, a lawyer in the San Francisco Bay area, bought two deteriorating lighthouses at auction: one, in Chesapeake Bay, for $100,000, the other, in Delaware Bay, for $200,000. “The alternative was doing nothing and losing them to the point where they’re not salvageable,” he said.

Once a lighthouse is rescued from abandonment, the question for owners becomes “Now what?” Mr. Gabriel hopes to use one of the stations as a summer house, with the other, perhaps, catering to tourists.

“I’ve looked into doing a microbrewery, a hamburger joint, just little stuff to bring in enough money to cover the year-to-year maintenance,” he said.

Some of the new keepers are working hard just to keep the lights on. (Or in the case of St. Helena Island, which is not wired for electricity, the volunteers are working to keep the candles lighted and the flashlights on.)

Abandoned in 1922, the St. Helena Island lighthouse has been a $1.3 million job so far, paid for mostly with donations and grants. In addition to the tower, the volunteers have restored the keeper’s and assistant keeper’s quarters, a boathouse and a dock. Materials and transportation to the island are the greatest expenses.

nytimes.com

A Battle in Mining Country Pits Coal Against Wind

LORELEI SCARBRO’S husband, Kenneth, an underground coal miner for more than 30 years, is buried in a small family cemetery near her property here at the base of Coal River Mountain. The headstone is engraved with two roosters facing off, their feathers ruffled. Kenneth, who loved cockfighting, died in 1999, and, Ms. Scarbro says, he would have hated seeing the tops of mountains lopped off with explosives and heavy machinery by mining companies searching for coal.

Critics say the practice, known as “mountaintop removal mining,” is as devastating to the local environment as it is economically efficient for coal companies, one of which is poised to begin carving up Coal River Mountain. And that has Ms. Scarbro and other residents of western Raleigh County in a face-off of their own.

Their goal is to save the mountain, and they intend to do so with a wind farm. At least one study has shown that a wind project could be a feasible alternative to coal mining here, although the coal industry’s control over the land and the uncertain and often tenuous financial prospects of wind generation appear to make it unlikely to be pursued. That, residents say, would be a mistake.

“If we don’t stop this,” Ms. Scarbro says, adjusting the flowers on her husband’s grave, “one day we’ll be standing on a big pile of rock and debris, and we’ll be asking, ‘What do we do now?’ ”

For many renewable-energy advocates outside the region, the struggle at Coal River Mountain has become emblematic of an effort across the country to find alternatives to fossil fuels. They have lent money, expertise and high-profile celebrities like Daryl Hannah and James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist, to help residents advance their case for wind power and to make it a test case for others pursuing similar projects nationwide.

The mountain, which is privately owned and leased to coal interests, is also one of the last intact mountaintops in a region whose contours have otherwise been irreversibly altered by extreme surface-mining techniques. Preserving its peaks for a wind farm, plan advocates say, could provide needed job diversification for impoverished towns that otherwise live or die by the fortunes of coal.

Don L. Blankenship, the chief executive of Massey Energy, the largest coal company in West Virginia and the one planning to cut into Coal River Mountain’s peaks, has repeatedly called assertions of long- and short-term environmental damage exaggerated.

“There are a lot of misstatements out there,” Mr. Blankenship says. “I don’t find the environmental damage to be nearly what people say they find it to be, and we’re struggling with whether the true objective of all these regulations is to protect the environment, or whether it’s simply to stop the mining of coal.”

While the odds remain slim that wind power will replace coal mining here, proponents say that changes in state and federal mining regulations could tilt things in their favor.

“We want to make it economically unfeasible to do mountaintop mining,” Ms. Scarbro says.

COAL mining of all kinds has long played a vital role in the West Virginia economy, and the state still sits on more than 30 billion tons of coal reserves, according to federal estimates. It produced 158 million tons in 2008, second only to Wyoming, at 468 million. And with roughly half of the United States’ electricity derived from coal-fired power plants, the incentive to keep digging here is strong — particularly in the handful of counties in the southwest corner of the state, where a majority of its 20,000 coal-industry jobs are concentrated.

Still, that number is down substantially from a peak of 130,000 jobs in the 1940s, and the decrease suggests less about production than about the rise of mechanized surface mining, including mountaintop removal. The resulting debris — a mixture of rock, dirt and other leftovers known as “spoil” — is dumped into valleys and streams below.

Hundreds of feet of elevation are sometimes removed, with equal amounts of nearby valley filled in, creating a peculiar landscape of high, wide plateaus in various stages of revegetation, encircled by the pointy, forested peaks native to the area.

Outside the industry, mountaintop removal mining has few defenders, and it has come under increasing regulatory scrutiny for its environmental impact. Mining companies, however, value it as a cost-effective way to gain access to coal deposits that otherwise couldn’t be reached.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/business/energy-environment/15coal.html?ref=business

With Remarks on Mosque, Obama Enters Risky Debate

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — Faced with withering Republican criticism of his defense of the right of Muslims to build a community center and mosque near ground zero, President Obama quickly recalibrated his remarks on Saturday, a sign that he has waded into even more treacherous political waters than the White House had at first realized.

In brief comments during a family trip to the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama said he was not endorsing the New York project, but simply trying to uphold the broader principle that government should “treat everybody equally,” regardless of religion.

“I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there,” Mr. Obama said. “I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.”

But Mr. Obama’s attempt to clarify his remarks, less than 24 hours after his initial comments at a White House iftar, a Ramadan sunset dinner, pushed the president even deeper into the thorny debate about Islam, national identity and what it means to be an American — a move that is riskier for him than for his predecessors.

From the moment he took the oath of office, using his entire name, Barack Hussein Obama, as he swore to protect and defend the Constitution, Mr. Obama has personified the hopes of many Americans about tolerance and inclusion. He has devoted himself to reaching out to the Muslim world, vowing, as he did in Cairo last year, “a new beginning.”

But his “new beginning” has aroused nervousness in some, especially those who disagree with his counterterrorism policies, or those more comfortable with a vision of America as a white and largely Christian nation, and not the pluralistic melting pot Mr. Obama represents.

The debate over the proposed Islamic center in Manhattan only intensified on Saturday, as the conservative blogosphere lighted up with criticism of Mr. Obama, and leading Republicans — including Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker; Representative John A. Boehner, the House minority leader; and Representative Peter T. King of New York — forcefully rejected the president’s stance.

Mr. Gingrich accused the president of “pandering to radical Islam.” Mr. Boehner said the decision to build a mosque so close to ground zero was “deeply troubling, as is the president’s decision to endorse it.” And Mr. King flatly said the president “is wrong,” adding that Mr. Obama had “caved in to political correctness.”

Indeed, the criticism was so intense that the White House ultimately issued an elaboration on the president’s clarification, insisting that the president was “not backing off in any way” from the comments he made Friday night.

“As a citizen, and as president,” Mr. Obama said then, “I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”

The local issue of the mosque and the wider issues of Islam and religious freedom are just part of a divisive cultural and political debate that is percolating in various forms during this hotly contested election season. On Capitol Hill, for instance, some Republicans advocate amending the Constitution to bar babies born to illegal immigrants from becoming citizens — a move the president also opposes.

“I think it’s very important, as difficult as some of these issues are, that we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about,” the president said here on Saturday.

Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, also held annual Ramadan celebrations and frequently took pains to draw a distinction between Al Qaeda and Islam, as Mr. Obama did Friday night. But Mr. Obama, unlike Mr. Bush, has been accused of being a closet Muslim (he is Christian) and faced attacks from the right that he is soft on terrorists.

“For people who already fear the worst from Obama, this only confirms their fears,” said John Feehery, a Republican consultant who spent years as a top party aide on Capitol Hill. “This is not a unifying decision on his part; he chose a side. I understand why he did this, but politically I think it’s a blunder.”

White House aides say Mr. Obama was well aware of the risks. “He understands the politics of it,” David Axelrod, his senior adviser, said in an interview.

Few national Democrats rushed to Mr. Obama’s defense; party leaders, who would much prefer Mr. Obama to talk about jobs, were mostly silent. Two New York Democrats, Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand and Representative Jerrold Nadler, however, did back Mr. Obama. But Alex Sink, the Democratic candidate for governor here, distanced herself, while Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican-turned-independent, defended the president.

“I think he’s right,” Mr. Crist told reporters during an appearance with the president at a Coast Guard station here.

Mr. Obama has typically weighed in on such delicate matters only when circumstances have forced his hand, as he did during his campaign for president, when he gave a lengthy speech on race in America in response to controversy swirling around his relationship with his fiery former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

Debate about the Islamic center had been brewing for weeks, yet Mr. Obama had studiously sidestepped it.

But the Ramadan dinner seemed to leave the president little choice. Aides said there was never any question about what he would say.

“He felt that he had a responsibility to speak,” Mr. Axelrod said.

Edward Wyatt contributed reporting from Washington.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/us/politics/15mosque.html?hp

This Time, Voter Anger Is No Surprise to Democrats

NEVADA, Mo. — A year ago, dozens of protesters gathered outside the district office of Representative Ike Skelton, a Democrat who has represented a wide stretch of western Missouri since 1976. The anger they directed at health care legislation — and by extension most Congressional Democrats — left the party in a state of near panic.

It may, in retrospect, have been the best thing that could have happened to Mr. Skelton and his colleagues.

In the arsenal of advantages that Republicans hold as they seek to win control of Congress this year, one thing is missing: the element of surprise. Unlike 1994, when Republicans shocked Democrats by capturing dozens of seats held by complacent incumbents, there will be no sneak attacks this year. Democrats have sensed trouble for more than a year, with the unrest from town-hall-style meetings last August providing indisputable evidence for any disbelievers.

The result has been to goad many Democrats into better preparation: more fund-raising, earlier advertising, lots of time on the campaign trail.

“People have been very, very kind through the years,” said Mr. Skelton, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who is running for an 18th term. “But there is some unrest this time. I take it very seriously.”

In the last two elections, Democrats picked up 55 seats in the House, earning a majority that party leaders know will now narrow. The question is not whether Republicans will win seats in November, but rather how many. Democrats believe that their fortunes would be far worse if the voter discontent had stayed at bay until this August.

In 1994, when Republicans swept control of Congress, it was not until a few weeks before the election — and in some cases on Election Day itself — that some veteran Democrats knew they were truly at risk.

The House speaker, Thomas J. Foley, and Dan Glickman, a congressman from Kansas who led the Intelligence Committee, were among the Democrats who lost their seats because they did not detect the political trouble ahead. At Labor Day that year, Mr. Glickman said, his polling showed that he held a 30-point lead. A month later, he was in a steep decline.

“We did not anticipate the level of discontent out there until October,” Mr. Glickman recalled in an interview. “I was in parades all over my district, and I would see people campaigning for my opponent. I would say to my wife, ‘Who are these people?’ ”

This year, Democrats are all too aware of their detractors.

“Some people were taken aback by the anger,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who is hardly among the most vulnerable Democrats but said he was campaigning harder than any other election since 1982. “We’re professional people who are used to affection. It’s almost disorienting.”

Many Democrats have raised more money so far this year than in the entire previous election cycle. They formed their campaign teams several months ahead of schedule and began running television advertisements earlier than ever. Realizing they could do little to improve the political climate, they are trying to fortify themselves with sharper tactics.

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who has led recruitment efforts for Republicans, said that Democrats might be more prepared than they were in 1994, but that they had done nothing to improve their standing with voters who are frustrated with the party’s agenda.

“The surprise factor may not be there,” he said, “but what do you do if you’re in trouble? You change your behavior. They have not. Their message doesn’t resonate with people.”

The discontent of last August, which became the soundtrack of talk radio and cable television, may also have helped Democrats in another way. An unusually large number of Republicans ran for office this year, including many aligned with the Tea Party movement, spreading the opposition among several candidates rather than consolidating it against specific Democratic rivals.

Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, began meeting with some of his party’s most established lawmakers in early 2009 to see if they were running assertive, modern campaigns and raising enough money to fuel them. He said some members were slow to realize the extent of the political unrest.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/us/politics/15town.html?hp

Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents

WASHINGTON — At first, the news from Yemen on May 25 sounded like a modest victory in the campaign against terrorists: an airstrike had hit a group suspected of being operatives for Al Qaeda in the remote desert of Marib Province, birthplace of the legendary queen of Sheba.

But the strike, it turned out, had also killed the province’s deputy governor, a respected local leader who Yemeni officials said had been trying to talk Qaeda members into giving up their fight. Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, accepted responsibility for the death and paid blood money to the offended tribes.

The strike, though, was not the work of Mr. Saleh’s decrepit Soviet-era air force. It was a secret mission by the United States military, according to American officials, at least the fourth such assault on Al Qaeda in the arid mountains and deserts of Yemen since December.

The attack offered a glimpse of the Obama administration’s shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies. In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

The White House has intensified the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, approved raids against Qaeda operatives in Somalia and launched clandestine operations from Kenya. The administration has worked with European allies to dismantle terrorist groups in North Africa, efforts that include a recent French strike in Algeria. And the Pentagon tapped a network of private contractors to gather intelligence about things like militant hide-outs in Pakistan and the location of an American soldier currently in Taliban hands.

While the stealth war began in the Bush administration, it has expanded under President Obama, who rose to prominence in part for his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged. In contrast with the troop buildup in Afghanistan, which came after months of robust debate, for example, the American military campaign in Yemen began without notice in December and has never been officially confirmed.

Obama administration officials point to the benefits of bringing the fight against Al Qaeda and other militants into the shadows. Afghanistan and Iraq, they said, have sobered American politicians and voters about the staggering costs of big wars that topple governments, require years of occupation and can be a catalyst for further radicalization throughout the Muslim world.

Instead of “the hammer,” in the words of John O. Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, America will rely on the “scalpel.” In a speech in May, Mr. Brennan, an architect of the White House strategy, used this analogy while pledging a “multigenerational” campaign against Al Qaeda and its extremist affiliates.

Yet such wars come with many risks: the potential for botched operations that fuel anti-American rage; a blurring of the lines between soldiers and spies that could put troops at risk of being denied Geneva Convention protections; a weakening of the Congressional oversight system put in place to prevent abuses by America’s secret operatives; and a reliance on authoritarian foreign leaders and surrogates with sometimes murky loyalties.

The May strike in Yemen, for example, provoked a revenge attack on an oil pipeline by local tribesmen and produced a propaganda bonanza for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It also left President Saleh privately furious about the death of the provincial official, Jabir al-Shabwani, and scrambling to prevent an anti-American backlash, according to Yemeni officials.

The administration’s demands have accelerated a transformation of the C.I.A. into a paramilitary organization as much as a spying agency, which some critics worry could lower the threshold for future quasi-military operations. In Pakistan’s mountains, the agency had broadened its drone campaign beyond selective strikes against Qaeda leaders and now regularly obliterates suspected enemy compounds and logistics convoys, just as the military would grind down an enemy force.

For its part, the Pentagon is becoming more like the C.I.A. Across the Middle East and elsewhere, Special Operations troops under secret “Execute Orders” have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies. With code names like Eager Pawn and Indigo Spade, such programs typically operate with even less transparency and Congressional oversight than traditional covert actions by the C.I.A.

And, as American counterterrorism operations spread beyond war zones into territory hostile to the military, private contractors have taken on a prominent role, raising concerns that the United States has outsourced some of its most important missions to a sometimes unaccountable private army.

A Proving Ground

Yemen is a testing ground for the “scalpel” approach Mr. Brennan endorses. Administration officials warn of the growing strength of Al Qaeda’s affiliate there, citing as evidence its attempt on Dec. 25 to blow up a trans-Atlantic jetliner using a young Nigerian operative. Some American officials believe that militants in Yemen could now pose an even greater threat than Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.