Politico

As the longest-serving secretary of health and human services, Donna Shalala knows the ins and outs of America’s health care infrastructure.

Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993 after serving as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and chairwoman of the Children’s Defense Fund, Shalala ran the Department of Health and Human Services through all eight years of the Clinton presidency, playing an integral role in launching welfare reform, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and other initiatives.

Since leaving government in 2001, Shalala has been president of the University of Miami and is still regarded as one of the country’s foremost experts on government and health care. In 2007, she co-chaired a commission on veterans’ care with former Senate Republican leader Bob Dole.

With the presidential election just a month away, Shalala shared some thoughts about the health care challenges facing the next administration — and the inadequacy of both presidential nominees’ approaches to public health.

Here is her e-mail exchange with Politico’s Alexander Burns.

Q: Having served as the nation’s top health care official, what are the worries that keep you up at night? What’s the biggest threat to our public health that no one’s talking about?

A: It is just not sexy to talk about how fragmented our response to emergencies is: hurricanes, earthquakes, disease outbreaks, drug safety, chemical and bioterrorism attacks. FEMA is not sophisticated enough to handle all of them. The Department of Homeland Security is just not the right organization to be a leader. It further fragments response.

We need a fresh look at how we organize — our reporting systems, etc., and resources. I do not favor a total centralization to the feds — emergency responders on the ground are key, but the system gets weaker as you go up the line. We need to use modern technology and rethink the entire system to make it seamless.

Q: How well-protected are our food and water resources? How actively is the government shielding them from terrorist threats?

A: It is government — not a single entity — that is protecting our food and water resources. Multiple federal agencies, the states and local public health agencies. It is not a seamless system, and [it is] totally dependent on individual doctors, hospitals and clinics reporting illness so they can be fit into a pattern by public health officials.

Q: Do you think the presidential candidates understand public health issues in these terms?

A: Neither of the two candidates for president understand how public-private fragmentation of responsibility and funding put our fundamental health infrastructure at risk. It is feasible. We are paying for the uninsured now. Every time they go to an emergency room, the rest of us pay through our own insurance.

Q: Do you think it’s feasible for the next president to enact a national health care program? Have Barack Obama and John McCain released any proposals in this area that strike you as particularly worthwhile?

A: Sen. Obama’s plan is sensible and thoughtful. It builds on the existing system and is affordable if phased in. He will need to build major consensus among stakeholders.

Q: Are there any health care or public health initiatives on the state or local level — such as Mitt Romney’s health insurance effort in Massachusetts or San Francisco’s experiment with universal access — that you think could be implemented on a larger scale?

A: Very few states can afford to close the gap. But using the Medicaid waiver authority experimenting with states to close the gap will provide enough learning for national legislation. That’s what we did to get welfare reform. We used the waiver authority of HHS to do 40-plus state experiments; out of that came an emergency consensus. I would not encourage just the Massachusetts model. Rather, encourage the states to try different approaches, including non-insurance ideas.

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Harry Wingo: 144,000 Search Results and Counting

As part of Google’s expanding Washington presence, Harry Wingo has joined its D.C. office as policy counsel. He’ll work on a range of Internet issues and encourage energy policies to accelerate the deployment of smart electric grids, utility-scale renewable energy sources and plug-in electric vehicles.

Most recently, Wingo was executive vice president of the Current Group, where he advocated increasing the efficiency, reliability and security of the nation’s electric grids.

He has also been counsel to the Senate Commerce Committee, where he handled hot issues such as the digital television transition, broadband deployment, spectrum management and industry competition. Earlier, he worked at the Federal Communications Commission, serving one year as legal adviser to the wireless telecommunications bureau chief and two years as special counsel to the general counsel.

The Yale Law School grad also worked for Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and was a law clerk to federal Judge James Robertson in Washington.

Livingston Makes Responsible Choice

For all those folks who consider Starbucks an example of cold, hard globalization — well, Sandra Taylor has been working to ease that image.

After five years as senior vice president of corporate social responsibility for the coffee empire, Taylor is moving to The Livingston Group as a senior partner.

There, she’ll work in several of the consulting firm’s target areas — corporate social responsibility, congressional oversight and international relations/business development — using the skills she honed at Starbucks, where she led social investment programs for education, health and income generation in the coffee-farming regions of Central America, India and Africa.

Taylor was a Foreign Service officer at the State Department, where she made the contact that would eventually lead to her current job.

“Sandra and I met in Mexico City when we were both diplomats,” said Lauri Fitz-Pegado, a Livingston Group partner. “She is a rare individual whose experience derives from a rich and diverse career path, from diplomacy to development.”

Taylor also was vice president and public affairs director for Eastman Kodak Co. and a legislative aide in the Senate. She’s president of a nonprofit group called Sustainable Business International, as well as co-chairwoman and founder of the American and African Business Women’s Alliance.Let the Task Force Be With You

Patton Boggs is the latest Washington firm making the financial crisis a top priority of its client services.The firm recently created a 30-member task force of senior members from its nine offices to bring legal and economic expertise to its clients.

Charlie Miller, deputy managing partner of the firm, says the task force is not new, per se, because it centralizes what the firm had already been doing.

“We are the No. 1 public policy practice out there,” he said, “and we advise regularly on complex legislative issues and implementation and government contracting — all the things that will surround the establishment of this multidisciplinary task force.”

A Dozen New Partners at Covington & Burling

The top brass at Covington & Burling has elected 12 lawyers partners in the firm — eight from its Washington branch.

John Bies, Steven Fagell, James Garland and Benjamin Razi are associates in the firm’s litigation team. Scott Cunningham and Scott Danzis are moving up in the food and drug field, while Derek Ludwin will concentrate on antitrust issues. Emin Toro is a tax attorney.

“These young and talented new partners are important building blocks for our future,” said Timothy Hester, chairman of the firm’s management committee.

Air America Gains Digital Officer

Michael Bassik will become the new chief digital officer of the liberal Air America Media on Nov. 6.

Bassik helped build the largest online political marketing firm at MSHC Partners, where he was vice president of interactive marketing. In his new position at Air America Media, he’ll focus on the company’s digital strategy.

“The Internet has proven itself the driving force in this year’s presidential election,” Bassik said. “I’m eager to work with the team to make Air America the leading online and mobile destination for entertaining and independent political news and thought.”

— Ariel Alexovich and Jacqueline Klingebiel

Suite Talk is a regular Politico feature that follows career changes, client developments and other movements in the public affairs sector. Please send news items and photos to suitetalk@politico.com.

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Tommy Thompson was secretary of health and human services during President Bush’s first term, after a record 14 years as the Republican governor of Wisconsin.

There, he led the creation of BadgerCare, a state program to provide health coverage to families whose employers don’t provide insurance but who make too much money to qualify for Medicaid. And as HHS secretary, he used the waiver program to replicate the plan in several states.

He also oversaw the federal response to the 2001 anthrax threats and played a key role in formulating the Medicare Part D prescription drug plan.

Thompson’s bid for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination was short-lived, and he’s now a senior partner at the law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.

Here are excerpts from an interview by Politico’s David Mark.

Q: Having served as the nation’s top health care official, what are the worries that keep you up at night? What’s the biggest threat to our public health that no one’s talking about?

A: The worst-case scenario to me was food poisoning. That we were not prepared for somebody adulterating the food, and we didn’t have enough inspectors. We’re inspecting less than 1 percent of all the food coming into America.

After 9/11, I was able to get a spike up [in funding for food inspectors]. The organizations that I’m part of were able to get an increase of $175 million into the [Food and Drug Administration] budget, so we’ll be able to ramp back up to where it was a few years ago. But even that’s still not enough.

The second big problem is that we don’t have enough surge capacity for hospitals if there is an attack. No. 3, we don’t have enough vaccines for anthrax. We’re getting there, but we don’t have enough. Or we’re not prepared for a pandemic flu epidemic.

Q: Do you think the presidential candidates understand public health issues in these terms?

A: The thing that we haven’t addressed as much as we should have, and we need to, is the fact that Medicare is going broke. Medicare is going broke in 2012, and that’s only a little more than three years from now.

What’s taking place with the economy — the same type of catastrophic thing is going to hit health care in the year 2012. If we’re not prepared economically, we’re not prepared for the health care demise in 2012. I keep preaching about that, but nobody’s listening.

What’s really concerning me is that nobody is addressing the problems related to Medicare. Medicare right now takes up about 3 percent of the gross national product. In 75 years, and that’s what we have to look at in government, 75 years into the future, Medicare is going to take up 15 percent of the gross national product. By comparison, Social Security now takes up about 5 percent [of GNP], and 75 years from now, it will take up about 7 percent. You can see how much more serious the problem is with Medicare versus Social Security.

You’re going to have to means test Medicare. There isn’t a Republican or Democrat who can do that. So the only way I believe you can fix Medicare — and I’ve called upon both presidential candidates to do this — is, immediately after the election, have a base-closing-type commission, with an equal number of Republicans and Democrats. They’re going to have to make these tough decisions and then allow Congress to vote it up or down.

Q: Do you think it’s feasible for the next president to enact a national health care program? Have Barack Obama and John McCain released any proposals in this area that strike you as particularly worthwhile?

A: Our system, fraught with all the problems it has, is still the best system for bringing new medicines, new therapies and new innovations to the marketplace.

Can our system be improved? Absolutely. But a government-controlled system is not the way to go.

We should require every state to put out for bids, like we did on Medicare Part D. We didn’t know if it was going to work. We thought a competitive model was the way to go, but we had no basis for that. We just prayed and hoped that people were going to bid on it. We had a plethora of choices.

I would set it up in every state for singles and for families and allow you to contribute deductibles, and allow you to choose, just like you do in Medicare Part D. You would be absolutely amazed at how many people would be covered. And if you’re under 125 percent of poverty, the state would subsidize it. You don’t have to have a big-government-controlled system. You can set up a commission or commissioner.

Q: Are there any health care or public health initiatives on the state or local level — such as Mitt Romney’s health insurance effort in Massachusetts, or San Francisco’s experiment with universal access — that you think could be implemented on a larger scale?

A: BadgerCare is by far the best program in America today. It could be applied at the national level, and it could be applied at the state level, too, for the uninsured. It’s by far the best program in the country — not because I started it; even a blind squirrel finds an acorn occasionally. It’s an excellent program, and every state should do it.

I think a bad idea is to think that you can have all the uninsured buy into the Medicare system. When you’ve got a Medicare system that’s going broke, you don’t want to expand it; you want to fix it. And that’s what Obama wants to do — he wants to set up a national insurance exchange, which would be to buy into these federal programs. What I’m saying is, let’s let the free enterprise system fix it at the state level with competitive bids. That’s a much better way. McCain is closer to that.

I think what is happening in our political system is that the Democrats are skewed toward a government fix and would like to get to a government-controlled system. Republicans want a free enterprise fix. There’s going to have to be a dovetailing on health care. It’s impossible to have a total government fix, and it’s naive to think you’re going to have just a free enterprise fix. We’re going to have to have involvement of both.

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To glean insight into the health care plans of Barack Obama and John McCain, it’s useful to look at how much — and what type of — intellectual investment they’ve made in the issue.

In other words: To whom do they listen in their campaigns for the presidency, and where do those people sit in a health care policy debate that has confounded the nation for years?

McCain’s team of advisers is dominated by free market advocates and government waste hunters. Small in number and ideologically tightly knit, the team has produced a targeted mix of spending controls and tax fixes to expand insurance coverage.

Obama’s health care team reads like a who’s who of broad reform advocates. Hailing from Capitol Hill and academia, the team has helped him craft a sweeping proposal that prods the private market to cover more people and provides a government backstop for those who can’t afford it.

Here’s a look at each brain trust.

McCain’s point man on health care is senior policy adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist who previously directed the Congressional Budget Office.

His second in command is Jay Khosla, who handles the campaign’s daily health care issues and is “one of those both technically proficient and broadly experienced health guys,” Holtz-Eakin said.

Khosla is a former congressional aide who worked for Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) and then-Senate Republican leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, a surgeon who returned to private practice after leaving office and who now teaches health care economics at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Another member of the brain trust is Gail Wilensky, a former director of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs targeted by McCain for reform and cost reductions.

A major health policy researcher, Wilensky is a brand name in Democratic and Republican policy circles. She is particularly known for an article she wrote outlining why the country needs a system for comparing cost effectiveness among different health treatments. And she has pushed Medicare reform.

“She has an encyclopedic knowledge of government health programs, how they function, how they work and their strengths and weaknesses. She is also well-regarded because her analyses are always sober,” said Robert Moffit, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Health Policy Studies. “Her recommendations are invariably measured, and she can always be depended upon to be a strong and steady voice for a conservative health policy agenda.”

McCain wants to scrap many of Medicare and Medicaid’s volume-based pay incentives and replace them with a system that rewards preventive and coordinated patient care. Reforming the programs would act as “a powerful lever to change the way medicine gets practiced in America,” Holtz-Eakin said.

“Once doctors and hospitals start practicing that way in Medicare, they’ll practice that way for everyone,” he said.

McCain’s plan would tax employer-sponsored plans to pay for a tax credit for everyone who buys insurance.

Also on McCain’s adviser roster is the American Enterprise Institute’s Thomas Miller, who has studied how to buy and sell insurance across state lines. He also has worked on how to wring better value from health care spending through disease management, coordination of care and other routes.

“Miller is not simply concerned about how we’re paying for health care but what it is we’re getting for the dollars we’re paying,” Moffit said.

While both the McCain and Obama camps say they encourage feisty debate among their advisers, the conversation may be a bit rowdier in Obama’s shop.

His health care reform plan would create a national exchange to help people buy insurance that includes both public and private options. It would also tighten regulations on private insurers, including requiring them to cover pre-existing conditions.

The Illinois senator would mandate that children be covered by insurance, but he backed away from a total coverage mandate and opted instead for a system of sticks and carrots to drive uninsured adults to get coverage.

Obama’s team of advisers is anchored by three Washington veterans, including Dora Hughes, a former deputy health director for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who has spent decades pushing for health care reforms that would expand coverage to seniors and lower-income families.

Hughes is joined by economist Jason Furman, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, and Neera Tanden, a former adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

The trio handles much of the daily policy work of selling Obama’s plan and attacking McCain’s. Other advisers are Harvard professors David Cutler and Jeffrey Liebman, Obama’s Senate policy director Karen Kornbluh, and David Blumenthal, director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Institute for Health Policy.

“Each of us know a lot about the issue and also understand it in a campaign context,” Tanden said.

Rather than putting his advisers together in a room and asking them to hash out a plan, Obama asked them to argue — through e-mails, phone calls and other means — for their ideas, which he culled to fit his overall reform approach.

“My role has been to be an independent advocate for a particular set of ideas rather than someone who feels I have to be inside the campaign actually designing the proposal to get Sen. Obama elected,” said Jacob Hacker, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

He helped sell Obama on creating a choice among public and private plans. The progressive Health Care for America Now coalition based its principles on his plan, Hacker said.

“Both campaigns have hired a first-class set of advisers,” Moffit said.

The difference in the size of their teams, Moffit said, can also be attributed to the fact that there are far fewer conservative health policy analysts than there are liberal analysts.

“We’re a minority group,” he said.

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A Barack Obama administration

Tom Daschle

Pro: A veteran of the failed 1993 Clinton health care plan, the former Senate Democratic leader from South Dakota understands the game. A longtime advocate of health care reform, he laid out his own ideas in a new book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.”

Con: Daschle is also mentioned for other key posts in an Obama administration, including White House chief of staff. And his long stint as the Senate Democratic leader with a reputation as a political animal could make it difficult for him to broker the kind of bipartisan deal needed to reform health care.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius

Pro: As Kansas insurance commissioner, Sebelius cracked down on insurance companies that were violating federal law and championed prompt payment for claims. And as governor, she’s consolidated the state’s health programs to increase its purchasing power.

Con: She’s been mentioned for other posts, as well, in an Obama administration. But she’s in the middle of her last term and may be eyeing a run for the Senate.

Howard Dean

Pro: As governor of Vermont, Dean, a doctor, oversaw the expansion of universal health care for children and pregnant women. Now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Dean would bring considerable political and executive experience to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Con: As a very partisan, high-profile Democrat, Dean is one of the chief Democratic bomb-throwers and is not particularly well-positioned to work with Republicans in a bipartisan fashion to reform health care.

A John McCain administration

Mike Huckabee

Pro: The former Arkansas governor and unsuccessful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination is well-known as a health care reformer with a strong personal story. After being diagnosed with diabetes in 2003, Huckabee lost 110 pounds and ran four marathons. As a governor and presidential candidate, Huckabee championed children’s health care.

Con: He’s very affable, but his staunch conservatism could make confirmation difficult in a Democrat-controlled Senate.

Mark McClellan

Pro: With a medical degree and a Ph.D. in economics, McClellan is a double doc, known around town as one of the nation’s top health care experts. A respected administrator, McClellan has run the Food and Drug Administration and the Medicare and Medicaid programs in the current Bush administration. He also worked at the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration.

Con: His implementation of Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit, amid considerable confusion and controversy, drew mixed reviews from many Democrats.

Gail Wilensky

Pro: As a former head of the Medicare and Medicaid programs under President George H.W. Bush, Wilensky is familiar with the challenges facing two of the nation’s largest entitlement programs.

Con: As a McCain campaign adviser, Wilensky helped craft the Arizona senator’s health care reform proposal. And her support for the plan could mean tough sledding in a Senate controlled by Democrats looking to move the country in the opposite direction on health care.

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Politico’s guide to health care issues for the next president.

The candidates’ health care platforms

Candidates differ in insurance assurances

Who might serve as HHS secretary?

Health care advisers show plan diversity

Questions for Donna Shalala

Questions for Tommy Thompson

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Since the mid-1980s, there’s been almost no attention paid to John McCain’s long-ago association with a controversial group implicated in a secretive plot to supply arms to Nicaraguan militia groups during the Iran-Contra affair.

But now, with the Republican presidential candidate stepping up his negative blitz against Democratic opponent Barack Obama, some Democrats are hoping that the group – the U.S. Council for World Freedom, and its founder, John Singlaub – will become for McCain what Bill Ayers has become for Obama: a fleeting past association used as ammunition for political broadsides.

Over past few days, a handful of Obama allies – none directly associated with his campaign – have called attention to McCain’s ties to the council to rebut the McCain campaign’sincreasing focus on Obama’s ties to Ayers, a founder of the 1960s radical Weather Underground.

“This guilt by association path is going to be trouble ultimately for the McCain campaign,” Democratic strategist Paul Begala said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “John McCain sat on the board of a very right-wing organization, it was the U.S. Council for World Freedom, it was chaired by a guy named John Singlaub, who wound up involved in the Iran contra scandal. It was an ultra conservative, right-wing group.”

Since Begala made his comments, in which he mentioned the Anti-Defamation League’s 1981 condemnation of the council’s parent group as anti-Semitic, a growing group of bloggers have referenced Begala’s self-described “shot across the bow,” and have tried to flesh out McCain’s ties to the council and to Singlaub, a decorated retired Army major general with a background in special operations and intelligence.

Some lefty bloggers urged Obama’s campaign, which on Monday unveiled an ad highlighting McCain’s involvement in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal, to expand its attacks to include the U.S. Council for World Freedom.

Singlaub founded the council in Phoenix in November, 1981, as the U.S. branch of the World Anti-Communist League, which he also helped run for a time. The league billed itself as a supporter of “pro-Democratic resistance movements fighting communist totalitarianism.” But the Anti-Defamation League in 1981 alleged that the anti-Communist league also had had “increasingly become a gathering place, a forum, a point of contact, for extremists, racists and anti-Semites.”

Singlaub eventually won some praise from the anti-defamation group for working to purge those elements form the league.

The U.S. Council recruited McCain soon after it set up shop in Phoenix, where McCain was starting to lay down roots as he eyed his first run for elected office, a 1982 U.S. House race he won.

An aide to McCain’s presidential campaign, who did not want to be identified discussing an episode the aide had no firsthand knowledge of, said McCain would never have gotten involved with the council if it had continuing ties to extremists, racists and anti-Semites.

“McCain has a long and consistent and strong record on issues involving Israel and he would never be associated with anything that was anti-Semitic in any way,” the aide said.

In October 1986, McCain told Phoenix’s New Times alternative weekly newspaper that he agreed to join the group’s advisory board because “they’re for freedom and they’ve got some good people involved,” but he also asserted he only attended one meeting.

The New Times article – and a handful of stories in other local papers – appeared in the days after the Reagan administration fingered the council for operating a plane that was shot down that month while flying supplies to Nicaraguan Contra rebels.

Singlaub, who did not respond to Politico’s telephone and e-mail messages seeking comment, at the time denied the council was involved with the plane. But he later acknowledged during congressional hearings on the Iran-Contra affair that he was part of a secret program carried out with the knowledge of U.S. military officials that used former intelligence operatives to arm the anti-Communist Contras, circumventing a ban on U.S. military assistance to the rebels.

At the time of the crash, McCain was running for Senate, and his campaign aides told the local press that he had resigned from the council’s board in 1984.

“John had heard at the time that they were supplying arms to the Contras,” Torie Clarke, then McCain’s Senate campaign spokeswoman, told the Phoenix Gazette. She told the Tucson Citizen that McCain “vehemently opposes any activity that would violate the neutrality act.” But she said McCain did not alert authorities to what she called the council’s “many questionable activities.” She also stressed to the Citizen that “there weren’t any real specific incidents. There was a general theme with which John was not aligned.”

According to New Times, though, McCain’s 1984 letter of resignation attributed his decision to part with the group to his lack of time, but praised the group’s “dedication to our country.” McCain remained on the group’s letterhead through March 1985, and he attended the group’s October 1985 “Freedom Fighter of the Year” award ceremony in Washington.

Brian Rogers, a spokesman for McCain’s presidential campaign, issued a statement to Politico asserting that McCain “disassociated himself” from the group “when questions were raised about its activities, but that in no way diminishes his leadership role in ensuring that the forces of democracy and freedom prevailed in Central America.”

Rogers said McCain “fought long, hard and proud in opposition to Communist influence in Central America throughout the 1980s at a time when many, including Senator Obama’s running mate Senator Joe Biden, tried to cut off money for anti-Communist forces in El Salvador and Nicaragua.”

Begala told Politico that he raised McCain’s connection to the U.S. Council because he wanted to prove that “it’s really unwise for the McCain campaign to begin a campaign of guilt by association. And I was trying to demonstrate the way I think that Democrats ought to run their campaign. I could have just gone on and said ‘Democrats need to counterattack.’ Instead, I thought: why don’t I just do it?”

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Journalists by instinct tend to hedge their bets, so most don’t say in public what they really think. But our conversations with colleagues make clear what many think about the great race between Barack Obama and John McCain: This election is just about over, and Obama is about to be president.

There’s a big difference, of course, between just about over and stick-a-fork-in-it over. A lot could happen, after all, in the 29 days before Nov. 4.

And that leads to something else that a lot of political reporters — and a lot of political operatives and elected officials from both major parties that we have spoken with — believe to be true but tend not to say when cameras are rolling.

By far the most likely thing that could derail Obama’s victory is a racial backlash that is not visible in today’s polls but is waiting to surge on Election Day — coaxed to the surface (to the extent coaxing is needed) with the help of coded appeals from McCain and his conservative allies.

Racial issues tend to hover in the background in much of the public analysis of the Obama-McCain horserace — often mentioned but not usually as the dominant factor. By contrast, it is increasingly the subject of obsessive interest in the nonstop, not-for-attribution conversation that takes place between reporters, political analysts and campaign sources in the heat of an election.

As a result, much of the news coverage and commentary that the media will produce over the next month will flow from the assumption that racial antagonisms are an unexploded bomb in this contest. By this logic, if Obama does not head into Nov. 4 with a lead of at least several points in the polls, there is a good chance he’ll be swamped by prejudice that will flourish in the privacy of the voting booth.

“If Obama loses a close race,” James Carville told our colleague David Paul Kuhn, “it is almost inevitable that [racism] will be a very big part of the interpretation of the race.”

On the principle that someone who had bet against the conventional wisdom at every turn in this presidential race would have made a lot of money, Politico dispatched reporters to examine survey data and talk to voters in an effort to gauge the potential of a racial surge against Obama.

This reporting did not debunk the conventional wisdom. But it did find reason for at least a measure of skepticism on a couple of fronts:

The Bradley effect

This is the phenomenon, named after former Los Angeles Mayor Thomas Bradley, by which black candidates are thought to perform better in polls than they do on Election Day. (Bradley lost a race for governor in 1982 that polls said he was supposed to win. Similarly, Douglas Wilder barely won his race for Virginia governor in 1989, despite a big lead in polls).

Kuhn’s reporting, based on extensive conversations with several of the nation’s top pollsters and political consultants, shows a complex picture.

The pollsters say the days of voters lying in large numbers to pollsters to disguise their racial concerns are largely over. The only way the phenomenon of voters misleading pollsters will matter is if the race is very tight, they say.

“I have a concern that going into Election Day, in a dead heat, there could be some drop-off in support of Obama, of one or two points, because some voters are conflicted about race in this election,” said Democratic strategist Joe Trippi.

Buoyed by concerns about the financial crisis, Obama is building a big lead nationally and in key states – a lead that if it holds is probably big enough to compensate for any racial backlash, the pollsters say.

See story here: Do voters lie about racial concerns?

African-American turnout

There are signs that Obama is benefiting from a massive surge in voter registration and early voting among African-Americans — one that might be equal or greater than any white backlash. The surge is happening in Georgia and North Carolina, in particular. As Ben Smith reports in another piece, these efforts are being promoted with an under-reported campaign of Obama advertising aimed at the African-American vote.

As an Obama spokesman dryly told Smith, “If you didn’t notice it, then you probably weren’t the target.”

See story here: How Obama quietly targets blacks

The economy

Politico reporter Josh Kraushaar traveled to Scranton, Pa., where many of the older, lower-middle class white voters who are supposedly susceptible to racially coded appeals live.

He found deep anxiety about the troubled economy but relatively little discussion about race. It may take setbacks on Wall Street to reveal progress in racial attitudes on Main Street.

See story here: It’s not the racial issues, stupid

A word of warning about all of this. Sometimes the conventional wisdom is right.

Politico’s reporting found plenty of reasons to suppose that racial divisions could yet be a potent force next month.

A Democratic state legislator in a key Midwest swing state told us it is clear many older white voters, especially union members and those in rural reaches, will never vote for a black man. Lorene Coates, a Democratic legislator in North Carolina, said voters tell her the same thing all the time. “We’re a Southern state, [and] there are people who will not vote for a black man.”

Lisa Boscola, a Democratic state senator in Pennsylvania, said voters usually aren’t that blunt. She said they raise other concerns: experience, trustworthiness. “They’re trying to find an excuse,” she said.

The very murkiness of the race question is itself powerful evidence of changing times. Racial polarization used to be the great constant in American politics. In this election, instead, race is the great imponderable.

As long as that is the case, said Wilder, his friend Obama would be wise not to cut things close.

“Racism has not gone away, not will it ever leave,” said Wilder. This means Obama had better build an insurmountable edge “to offset the possibilities of racism or oversampling or people saying one thing and meaning another.”

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Less than a week before the 1989 election for Virginia governor, two newspaper polls showed L. Douglas Wilder, a black Democrat, comfortably ahead of his GOP opponent by between 9 and 11 points. But when the ballots were counted, it was a nail-biter that Wilder won by fewer than 7,000 votes.

Political scientists dubbed it “the Wilder effect,” or referred to it by its earlier name, “the Bradley effect,” after Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles who lost the 1982 California governor’s contest despite being up in the polls by as much as 22 points in the weeks before Election Day.

“The Wilder effect, the Bradley effect, is on the minds of everybody, without exception,” Neil Newhouse, who directs NBC News/Wall Street Journal polling, said, referring to what pollsters say is the phenomenon of some white people lying to pollsters about their support for black candidates.

The experiences of Bradley and Wilder loom ominously over Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, although opinion about the evidence of racially skewed polling in the election is mixed, political analysts said, and it was not seen in the Democratic primaries.

A GOP pollster, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said that his surveys suggested polls were slightly overestimating support for Obama.

A Democratic pollster, who also would not be quoted by name, said that when he surveyed Pennsylvania union members — who as a group tend to be older, white and working class — he found a striking 20 percent difference between how whites responded when questioned by blacks and how they responded when questioned by other whites.

But many pollsters, citing the vastly improved track record among black politicians in elections over the past decade, said they believed that the problem of whites lying to pollsters about their support for black candidates was largely a thing of the past.

“The Bradley effect is an historical artifact,” said David Bositis, one of the top analysts of black demographics, polling and politics. 

“The race question is a bit dated,” said Steve Elmendorf, deputy campaign manager for 2004 Democratic nominee John F. Kerry.

“Conventional wisdom is that race will cost any African-American candidate 1 to 5 points,” Elmendorf said. But Obama was drawing new voters to the rolls, particularly young people and African-Americans, and his Democratic primary victory showed a new political calculus at play. “I think this election is a little different,” he said.

Still, the memory is fresh, and political analysts said they remain concerned that the first presidential bid by a black major-party nominee could lead to old problems re-emerging.

“I have a concern that going into Election Day, in a dead heat, there could be some drop-off in support of Obama, of 1 or 2 points, because some voters are conflicted about race in this election,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who was Bradley’s deputy campaign manager in 1982.

Pollsters said they remain especially sensitive to the Bradley effect, saying that some portion of whites claim to back Obama because they believe that’s what black interviewers want to hear.

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said her polling found that “whites interviewed by blacks are 3 to 5 percent more supportive of Obama than whites interviewed by whites.” She said the effect was “most concentrated” among older whites who did not attend college.

But officials at other polling companies said they had not detected major problems with whites lying to black questioners.

In a review of 26,000 interviews conducted in September, the Gallup Poll “found no difference in the presidential vote choice of either black or white respondents based on the race of the interviewer,” said Gallup chief Frank Newport.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal pollsters studied thousands of their interviews and came to the same conclusion.

“We took a hard look ourselves — it’s too important,” Newhouse said. “I was surprised to see that there was literally no difference. It was within a point or two,” and therefore not statistically significant.

Obama’s own internal polling similarly did not detect a significant Bradley effect, a campaign source said in an interview in August.

“Race of interviewer may make some difference, but I’m not a great believer that pollsters are being lied to because of the Bradley effect,” said Andy Kohut, a former director of Gallup who now heads the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Sampling error is a bigger problem, he said. “My continuous concern are the people we are not getting, because I know the people who are more likely not to do surveys have more negative views about African-Americans.”

Bositis agreed, in part because “the novelty of black candidates has worn off.”

“This election is, for the most part, not about Barack Obama. This election is about throwing the in team out,” he said. “And Barack Obama is the captain of our team.”

Wilder, now the mayor of Richmond, said that pre-election polls in his 1989 gubernatorial race undersampled GOP voters in Virginia, although there was a Bradley effect, as well, he said.

“I didn’t believe double-digit figures,” Wilder recalled. “Our internal polling showed us plus or minus 2 — a dead heat.”

But, he added, “I think quite honestly there was more of the Bradley effect than bad polling, in terms of exit polls.” And Wilder said he remains concerned that “raw racism, … coupled with fears about who is going to be a leader, coupled with who has the right experience,” could alter the November election.

“Racism has not gone away,” Wilder said, “nor will it ever.”

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Never mind polls. Pennsylvania state Sen. Lia M. Boscola does not need numbers to understand the meaning of the voices she hears while knocking on doors in her Lehigh Valley district.

“I’m hearing, ‘Oh you know, he’s just not ready.’ I don’t know whether some of that has to do with his color. I think some of it does,” said Boscola, a veteran Democrat from Northampton County in the Lehigh Valley. “They say that they don’t trust him, and I don’t get it. What is it about him that’s bothering them?..It has to be [about his race] because they’re trying to find an excuse.”

In the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, Nancy Garland, a Democrat who is running for state representative, says she’s hearing the same thing, even if few will say so in plain terms.

“Nobody will say that to you, but it’s, you know, the 100-pound gorilla in the room," said Garland. "I have an individual that I see that works in a hair salon … and she says [Obama is] a Muslim, and I say, ‘No, he’s not.”

Yet at the same time, many of these politicians are reporting another phenomenon—that there is one central concern at the moment, the economy, and it seems to trump all, even deep-seated racial prejudice.

“It’s finally coming around to the economy which has been first and foremost on people’s minds where I live,” said Minnesota state Representative and Assistant Majority Leader Frank Moe, a Democrat. “The unemployment rate in North Minnesota is higher than the state of Minnesota which is higher than the national average," Moe said.

Indeed, when Politico sent a reporter last weekend to Scranton, Pa., a city that has suddenly and improbably become the Rosetta stone for interpreting the political habits and racial attitudes of working-class Catholics and white ethnics, economic concerns dominated interviews conducted with dozens of voters.

While there was widespread agreement that race would play a role in voting, the consensus was that high gas prices, the Wall Street crisis and an unemployment rate that has reached seven percent in the Scranton-area—the highest point in a decade in northeastern Pennsylvania—would overtake all others in a part of the country where Obama’s candidacy has been slow to gain traction.

That development is promising news for Obama since traditionally Democratic and working class northeastern Pennsylvania is being closely watched for signs—whether racial, cultural or ideological—that he will not be able to hold a key constituency in November.

By all accounts, Obama should have little trouble winning by comfortable margins in northeastern Pennsylvania. Scranton, the population hub of the region, has normally been a reliable Democratic stronghold, with John Kerry winning 56 percent of the vote in Scranton’s Lackawanna County in 2004, and Al Gore capturing 60 percent in 2000.

But in the April Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton won the county by a landslide. Clinton could point to local ties—her father is buried in Scranton and, as a child, she spent family vacations on the outskirts of Scranton at Lake Winola—but her overwhelming 74-26 percent margin raised questions about Obama’s ability to compete in the region and whether his race would be a stumbling block for some voters.

The issue is a familiar one in other socially conservative, traditionally Democratic strongholds with high numbers of white ethnic working class voters—places like northeast Minnesota’s Iron Range and Ohio’s industrial Mahoning Valley. And the conclusion, increasingly, appears to be the same.

"In Obama’s case, he has to overcome some hurdles John McCain doesn’t have to overcome due to the circumstances of his birth," said an Ohio Democratic legislator who asked not to be named. "Getting over the trust issue, the race issue, and the inexperience issue," is important.

"I didn’t necessarily notice people switching to Obama, but they’re souring on McCain," said the legislator. "Over the past couple of weeks, people have started to—I don’t know what it is—the economy is coming back into play or losing confidence in McCain’s ability to make decisions…there’s been a marked change in the doors I’ve knocked on, in a very rural white section of my district."

“Occasionally among some of the older generation – I think of people who are like my parents in their 80s — sometimes it has cropped up. But I think even that group is coming along,” said Minnesota state Senator Yvette Solon, who represents a district that covers the city of Duluth. “I think [Obama] was just a novelty, initially.”

Harry McGrath, the chairman of Lackawanna County Democratic Party, said he used to hear from many loyal Democratic voters who had serious reservations about voting for Obama. But in recent weeks, with the economy heading into recession, he’s seen the cultural issues recede in the minds of voters.

“I was with a union guy the other day, a politically active guy, he took a phone call, and he went white as if a family member died. He said… he just lost $150,000 in Wachovia stock,” he said. “This guy’s wife worked as a teller. It’s [the economy] is the biggest issue at this point, and I don’t see it going away.”

Avi Zenilman and Richard Cullen contributed to this report.

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