“Out would come this thinker who did great legislative stuff like Moynihan, but who also did the good constituent work like D’Amato,” said a former aide. “That was his goal.”

Now, as he stands on the verge of a landmark legislative achievement as an instrumental mover behind a grand health care compromise, the question isn’t so much whether he reached that goal, but what the next one might be.

In an interview this week at his office in Manhattan, Mr. Schumer removed himself from the maelstrom for a moment and reflected, without an outward hint of individual ambition, on his ever-increasing influence.

“I love legislating,” he said, not for the first time. “And we had to create a majority so we could legislate.”

MR. SCHUMER IS now the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, occupying an office that was specially created for him by the majority leader, Harry Reid, to entice him to pass up a run for governor in 2006, and some of his recent moves—especially his very public push for a bill that includes a “public option” health care plan, over the more tactical caution of the White House and Mr. Reid—have raised inevitable questions about the ceiling of his ambitions. Mr. Reid, who faces reelection in reddish Nevada next year, is very vulnerable, according to the polls, raising the possibility of a rare opening at the pinnacle of the Senate.

“I’m not trying to gild the lily. I’m happy where I am right now,” Mr. Schumer said. “Harry Reid is my buddy, my foxhole buddy, and I am doing everything I can to help him get reelected. And I strongly believe he will be reelected.”

Still, as Cook Political Report senior editor Jennifer Duffy asks, reasonably, “How can you not think about it, given Schumer’s rise?”

The story of that rise coincides with the long narrative of the Democrats’ return to dominance in Washington.

“I was in the House for 18 years, and I would have stayed in the House, because I loved it when we were in the majority, but we lost the majority in ’94,” Mr. Schumer said. “And in the House, when you’re in the minority, it’s bad. It’s the first time I’m telling a reporter this, but I’ve been in the Senate majority, Senate minority, House majority, House minority. Only one sucks. I got tired of going to the floor and just beating up on the Republicans without any effect. So I said to myself, ‘It’s up or out.’”

IN THE  YEARS immediately after his successful challenge to Mr. D’Amato, in 1998, he was widely regarded within the fusty ranks of the Senate as a simple political animal—a little too vulgar, too much of the House.

“Chuck was a guy in a hurry, and it showed,” said the former leadership aide. “People respected him, and they knew they needed him, and they knew he was good for the caucus and they wanted to win elections, but I think there was some eye-rolling about his demeanor. But I think the Senate is a place that shapes people, for better or for worse, and I think to a certain extent the institution, and his desire to lead it, has wrung the ‘House-ness’ out of him.”

“I think it’s very difficult for senators from the Northeast to develop a broader national constituency,” said Robert Torricelli, the former senator from New Jersey, whose career paralleled Mr. Schumer’s for a time but was ultimately derailed by ethics investigations. “Chuck was viewed with some skepticism when he arrived, because his identity was so intertwined with New York itself. So I think he has overcome some handicaps.”

One of the largest of those handicaps was a sense, based on regional identity as much as anything, that Mr. Schumer was far to the left of mainstream Democrats. In fact, in his 2007 book, Positively American, Mr. Schumer outlined a governing philosophy fixated on middle-class issues, an attempt to shift the underlying justification for liberalism from abnegation to self-interest. One of his contributions to this year’s stimulus bills is typical: a $2,500 college tuition tax credit for families making less than $180,000 a year.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER Barack Obama’s election, when many Democrats were talking about the New Deal and a sea change in the nation’s attitude toward activist government, Mr. Schumer was pushing a list of comparatively modest legislative priorities: reforming immigration, re-regulating the financial industry, a plan to reduce dependence on foreign energy sources. These issues, as he saw it, were capable of winning a broad consensus, and swift political dividends. “Health care is not one of them,” Mr. Schumer said. “That’s why I had recommended that we wait a little bit and not do it early on.”

Once it became clear that health care was Mr. Obama’s priority, however, Mr. Schumer inserted himself aggressively into the debate, staking out what he discerned to be the likely median point of opinion in the Senate: creating a health care provider, initially funded with public capital, that would compete in the marketplace like a private company—a concept Mr. Schumer calls the “level playing field.” To win moderate support, he later incorporated an escape hatch: States would be able to opt out of the public plan if they chose. Despite the compromise, Mr. Schumer’s plan was voted down in the Senate Finance Committee, leading most commentators to declare the public option dead.

But he stubbornly refused to drop the issue, saying that out on the Senate floor, his plan had a good shot at winning a filibuster-proof 60 votes. When Reid sounded less certain, Mr. Schumer went on MSNBC to say that he was urging the majority leader to put the public option into the Democratic bill. Last week, Mr. Reid announced he would do just that.

Though they seem to have worked, Mr. Schumer’s pressure tactics reportedly rankled both the majority leader and the White House. According to Politico, Mr. Reid questioned his subordinate’s taking to the airwaves. Mr. Schumer played down any divide, saying that he was genuinely close to both Mr. Reid—confidantes of both men say that’s true—and Mr. Emanuel, a hard-driving personality with whom he shares some notable similarities. He said that rapid-fire, process-driven press coverage has made it more difficult to move substantive legislation. “It’s not just that it’s a battlefield, who’s winning and who’s losing,” Mr. Schumer said. “It’s a dynamic, unfolding process.”

An illustration: Senator Joe Lieberman announced last week that he’d prefer no bill to a bill that included Mr. Schumer’s proposal, and plans to round up the necessary votes once again were clouded.

“The House can much more script where it’s going because they have a Rules Committee that says this amendment is allowed and this amendment is not allowed,” Mr. Schumer said.

The Senate is different. “You can’t really … I mean, I’ve had some people in the White House saying”—his voice went up an octave and increased slightly in nasality—“‘So what’s the exact game plan for when we go to the floor?’ You can’t have one, because anyone can introduce any amendment at any time, and the members react to it.”

MR. SCHUMER SAID said he was hopeful that the debate will move to a relatively quick resolution, because, in his view, the relentless focus on health care has crowded out priorities he’d hoped to address this year. He’s moving a far-reaching immigration bill, cosponsored with Lindsey Graham, through the Judiciary Committee, and he hopes to get to the pressing issue of financial regulation before the midterms. “The key is the systemic risk regulator,” he said, adding that he’s not sure if that responsibility will be taken over by the Federal Reserve, as some advocate, or an entirely new agency.

Handicapping the Senate’s internal politics is notoriously difficult. Most observers say that the most logical rival to Mr. Schumer, if the majority leader’s post were to open up, would be Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, who ranks second in the party hierarchy. Mr. Schumer might expect to have the votes of many of 14 senators he elected as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, while Mr. Durbin would be able to count on the support—explicit or implicit—of Mr. Obama, a close ally back when they served together. But Mr. Durbin and Mr. Schumer are close friends—in fact, they share a famously dingy apartment when they stay in Washington—so the personal dimension of the competition, if there is one, would be extremely thorny. (Mr. Durbin’s spokesman did not return phone calls.)

There are, of course, ways to leave a profound Senate legacy without holding the office of majority leader. Mr. Schumer’s model Jacob Javits never did; neither did Ted Kennedy. Yet no one who knows him doubts that the hypothetical has crossed his mind. If there’s one thing Chuck Schumer appreciates, it’s the value of a good plan.

editorial@observer.com

First, some background. As a journalist, it takes a lot to get yourself kicked out of Kenya. It’s not Sweden, but it’s a country with a vibrant free press. There are various accreditations required to work there as a foreign correspondent, but if you’re a reporter on a brief visit, you can generally enter with a tourist visa and rest assured that no one will bother you. Despite the contention of the W.N.D. article that Corsi was there to mount an “investigation into Barack Obama's connections in the country,” it seems that what primarily brought him to Kenya was a reception to publicize his book, The Obama Nation. According to Reuters, an invitation to the event, which was to be held at a Nairobi hotel, announced that Corsi would be exposing “Obama’s ‘deep secret ties’ to mafia-like groups in Kenya.”

Specifically, Corsi has been trying to link Obama to a Kenyan politician named Raila Odinga, a former presidential candidate. In past interviews—including one with me—Odinga has claimed a personal connection to the Democratic candidate’s father, and has reportedly even said he is distantly related to the Obama family. Corsi has sought to use this tenuous connection to link Obama to militant Islamists by claiming that Odinga (who is not a Muslim) may have undisclosed plans to institute to sharia law in Kenya, and—somewhat contradictorily—that Odinga is aligned with his country’s “extreme left wing.” Corsi’s allegations of sinister ties between the two politicians are all either false or grossly distorted, but they’ve been highly publicized in Kenyan newspapers. According to W.N.D., Corsi was going to expand on the book at his press conference, revealing Obama’s “connection to certain sectoral groups in Kenya and [a] subsequent plot to be executed in Kenya should Senator Obama win the American presidency.”

Here’s why Corsi’s antics were so incredibly irresponsible. A year ago, an election was held in Kenya. Odinga ran against the incumbent, President Mwai Kibaki. Kibaki was declared the winner of the election, under circumstances that outside observers declared highly suspicious. The contest between the two men revealed deep ethnic animosity between Kibaki’s tribe, the Kikuyu, and Odinga’s tribe, the Luo, who generally feel that they’ve been unfairly prevented from ruling the country. After the disputed vote, antagonists from both sides spilled into the streets with machetes. There were massacres. Hundreds of people died and many thousands were displaced from their homes. Eventually, after much arm-twisting, Kibaki and Odinga agreed to form a “unity” government. But the country is anything but unified, and many fear that violence could break out again. In warning of plots and secret mafias, Corsi is echoing the conspiratorial tribal rhetoric that helped to incite the killing.

It’s safe to assume that Corsi did not travel to Kenya to promote his book because he hoped to alert people there to the danger posed by a Obama presidency or, for that matter, because he hoped to sell many copies there. (Most Kenyans can’t afford hardcover books, for one thing, and a quarter of the population is illiterate.) What seems more likely is that the writer was hoping that bringing his book tour to Kenya would create a little exotic frisson and generate headlines back home, where The Obama Nation has fallen to number 26 on The New York Times' best-seller list. In handling the situation so ham-handedly, the Kenyan immigration authorities have given Corsi an attention-bump bigger than any he could have dreamed. Let’s hope that in the future, though, the author stays here in America, where his lies only endanger a deteriorating political culture, and not actual lives.

Today, everyone did. It will be some time before we know whether the speech the Republican vice presidential candidate gave last night was merely a very good debut, or a truly historic moment of emergence—the Republican version of Barack Obama’s keynote address to the Democratic convention in 2004. But the morning after, in the sealed container of the Twin Cities, exalted opinions were marinating. Gerson told me that what he had witnessed the night before was the “emergence of a Republican folk hero.”

“She went from facing the question, even among Republicans, of ‘is she ready?’ to being the future of the Republican Party,” Gerson said. “I think a lot of people who were in the audience last night are going to remember that speech like the one Ronald Reagan gave in 1964, as the beginning of a long-term political love affair.”

I asked Gerson if, in his professional opinion, the speech’s success was a product of the material or the delivery. He told me he didn’t know who’d written the speech. (In fact, the author was reportedly Matthew Scully, a former colleague of Gerson’s from the White House speechwriting shop who penned a harsh article in the Atlantic Monthly last year claiming that Gerson hogged credit for collaborative efforts.)

“I’m not close to the McCain team,” Gerson said, diplomatically. But of Scully’s product, he said: “In the judgment of one speechwriter, he had half a dozen memorable lines in his speech which were better than any line in Obama’s acceptance speech.” Gerson was particularly impressed with “the contrast between small town values and elitism,” the attacks on the Democratic candidate’s supposed arrogance, which were nimble and “done with humor.”

“She delivered lines last night like Reagan did,” he said.

The invocation of Reagan has become a trope of Republican politics; they are always glimpsing the next one, like Tibetan monks searching the earth for the new Panchen Lama. Palin has long way to go before she proves the comparison—after all, 16 years passed between “A Time For Choosing,” the Reagan speech in support of Barry Goldwater that vaulted him onto the national stage, and the election of 1980.

However, there seems to be a broad consensus (for what that's worth) that last night’s speech was a stunningly effective piece of rhetoric. Robert Schlesinger, deputy editor of U.S. News and World Report, and the author of White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters, said that Palin accomplished two important goals. The first was a policy objective, reassuring Republican base voters and reaching out to disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters. “The other level, the more important level, especially given the questions raised about her qualifications, was that she had to close the perception gap,” Schlesinger said. “She had to go up there and put people at ease that she could play in the big leagues.”

Back at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, where Gerson and others were participating in a series of forums about the election, the discussion turned in late morning to domestic politics. A panel that included Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, the political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, and Vin Weber, formerly a prominent Republican congressman from Minnesota and now a lobbyist and chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy, spent the better part of an hour assessing the importance of Palin’s speech. In contrast to the first few days of the convention, when Republicans went to elaborate (and, one suspected, not fully ingenuous) lengths to assure the world of their certainty that Palin was ready for high office, last night’s success freed them to acknowledge initial doubts.

“My first reaction,” to Palin’s selection, Weber said, “frankly, was skeptical.” After hearing the speech, the former lawmaker said, he’d changed his mind. In a typical election, he said, “the vice president is not likely to change the outcome,” but he suspected Palin was sui generis—that in some states, she might be even more in demand as speaker than the guy at the top of the ticket. “I’m going to tell you,” Weber said. “Sarah Palin is a rock star of the Republican Party, and they’re going to want her everywhere.”

“Us conventional types, we look at her resume and say it doesn’t quite meet the qualifications,” Weber added. But the Republican base, he said, “come to precisely the opposite conclusion: now we can trust his judgment.”

“That was what was stunning about the last 24 to 48 hours,” said Rothenberg. “It felt electrified last night, I thought. … She’s now got a critical two weeks where she’ll have to do some talk shows.”

Ornstein, however, said that he’d heard from Steve Schmidt, the McCain campaign’s chief strategist, that the plan was just the opposite. “They want to cloister her,” Ornstein said. “They’re clearly going to try to keep her away from the usual scrutiny.” He wryly observed that McCain foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann had been absent from another Humphrey Institute panel discussion, held the afternoon before Palin’s speech, which the advisor had previous committed to attend. “And we know why,” Ornstein said. He was apparently administering a crash course in international affairs to Palin.

“This is somebody who got a passport a year ago,” Ornstein said.

“I don’t think they can sustain very long keeping her from answering questions—I personally think she’ll do very well,” Weber said. “I think they’re making a big mistake if they don’t put her out there.”

For all of the Republicans’ giddiness today, it was easy to lose sight of a major historical point: whatever the speech means for Sarah Palin’s future ambitions—and it clearly means a lot—it’s highly improbable that her presence on the ticket will swing the race one way or another. Possibly, Orstein warned, Palin could still “implode,” with disastrous consequences for McCain, raising questions about his “shoot from the hip” style. Possibly, Rothstein said, Palin could make a difference in some crucial counties in western Ohio, the conservative communities that secured the 2004 election for President Bush. Possibly, Weber said, Palin would appeal to some younger rural and evangelical voters, who “might not have figured out what their moorings should be.”

“The notion that we have a vice presidential candidate that ice fishes is of critical importance,” the former congressman joked, getting a big laugh.

In the heat of such an exciting moment, however—the birth of a new hero—it was hard for most Republicans to keep their enthusiasm, or their praise, in check.

“People expected a female Dan Quayle,” said Michael Gerson. “And they got a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc.”

In speaking about relations with Russia, McFarlane called its government a “criminal regime” and “Russian thugs,” and suggested freezing the bank accounts of Vladimir Putin and others. Whatever the merits, it’s mighty undiplomatic language—and an indication of how the old Cold Warriors, and their rhetoric, have made a comeback since the outbreak of the Georgian conflict last month.

Here’s what McFarlane said:

“What you have to do is think what kind of government is this Russian government? What are its motives, what inspires a basically criminal regime? And how can you squeeze that? What are its vulnerabilities? And I think you have to consider getting to the point of locking the accounts of people who are stealing literally billions of dollars from the Russian state through control of its energy resources, working with allies to freeze those accounts, curtail or seriously inhibit Russia’s access to capital markets.

”The reaction in the world to what Russia has done in Georgia drove the Russian stock market down 30 percent in the space of a week’s time, and that must have been a sobering experience for one or two oligarchs who are heavily invested in the Russian stock market. So focusing on financial vulnerabilities is an important use of, call it soft power, or putting a real squeeze on Russia. I think however we do have to not just govern alone, and here again is something that Senator McCain has stressed and that is listening to allies and working closely with them.

”I think the nature of the current leadership of Russia—Putin, Medvedev, is thoroughly self-serving personally with very little regard for the Russian people.”

McFarlane mentioned that in his current job—he runs a consulting group called McFarlane Associates, Inc.—he’s had a chance to work in Russia.

“The next generation of Russians are people who have learned from the Internet and travel, through communications, what the West offers. They’re much more Western-oriented and I think they’ll govern far better. But we do have to get through this generation of Russian thugs. And I think that we must take tough measures to put a real squeeze on these individuals.”

It was less than 24 hours since the former Democrat’s convention speech in praise of his friend John McCain, and Lieberman was speaking as part of a panel discussion on the prospective McCain administration’s hypothetical foreign policy. The room was packed full of journalists, Republican officials and internationalist types, eager to hear from a man who has largely ostracized himself from his colleagues on Capitol Hill. Three other McCain advisors were sitting onstage, but it was Lieberman—whom Barack Obama endorsed just two years ago, when he faced a primary challenge—who volubly took the lead in criticizing the Democratic candidate, whom he described as unprepared to lead the country through a Manichaean global struggle.

“This is a difference, I think, between Senator Obama and Senator McCain,” he said. “There is good and evil in the world and there’s some people in the world who just hate us for various reasons. Hate our allies. And ultimately we are only going to make them more law abiding or less threatening members of the international community” by confronting them, he said, “as we have in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Lieberman was appearing at the session, held at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, as part of a weeklong series of policy forums. Taken together, the news that emerged from these discussions, at least when it came to the conflict that Lieberman described, was notably dire. At another forum earlier that morning, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, one expert warned that Iranian leaders are dangerously prone to misjudge American intentions, and another said that Israeli officials were “actually preparing” for a military attack on Tehran. Richard Haass, the former Bush administration State Department official who now heads the CFR, raised the possibility that Pakistan could soon become a failed state, and another panelist described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as being in a “suicide watch” stage, in which the “extinction” of one side or the other was a real possibility.

“We’re opening the bar early this morning,” Haass joked.

That forum, however, lacked big names, and it was far more sparsely attended than Lieberman’s, which also included Richard Williamson, the U.S.’s special envoy to Sudan, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, the former Reagan administration adviser (and Iran-Contra figure), and Robert Portman, the former Ohio congressman and current U.S. trade representative. The message from Lieberman and his fellow panelists was comparatively upbeat, as they described an improving Iraq and a world that’s democratizing, with the help of some muscular Republican foreign policy.

“This might get into the area of controversy,” Lieberman said, “but whatever one thinks about whether we should have gone into Iraq, Iraq now is potentially a great model for the future in the Islamic world.”

Then he turned to Obama, suggesting that his opposition to President Bush’s Iraq troop surge, had it been successful, would have carried disastrous consequences.

“A lot of my Democratic colleagues in the Senate, including Senator Obama, kind of gave up on Iraq when things were going tough in 2005 and 2006,” he said. “And you know John and I and others felt very strongly that—no matter what you thought about whether it was right to go in—the consequences of losing Iraq, the historic center of the Arab world, to Al Qaeda and Iran essentially and probably bringing about civil war if not genocide, was so severe that we had to try everything we could to avoid it.”

Though Lieberman has been arguing for such an interventionism for going on seven years, there was still something surreal to the spectacle of Al Gore’s running mate accusing the Democratic candidate of risking genocide. Even the other participants were a little bit boggled. “This is an out-of-body experience for me,” Portman joked. “I played the role of Joe Lieberman in debate preparation for Dick Cheney in 2000.”

“Some people say to me, how is it you could be the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2000 and you’re here supporting the Republican candidate for president eight years later?” Lieberman acknowledged, during a back-and-forth over trade issues. “Now obviously part of it is John McCain, our close working relationship,” he continued. “But part of it is that on some critical issues, to me anyway, and I think to our county, the Democratic Party has changed. I mean it’s only eight years ago that the Clinton-Gore administration is deeply committed to free trade.”

With that, Lieberman slipped in the knife.

“If Senator Obama really follows through on some of the things he’s said,” the senator said, “I think that those anti-trade policies will have the net effect of putting us—I don’t want to be alarmist but putting us into a lot worse shape economically than we otherwise would be, let me be as diplomatic as that.”

“This is a fateful decision,” Lieberman said, before getting up to leave the forum early. (He had an interview scheduled with Fox News.)

As he left, so did half the room, the journalists packing away their laptops and tromping off to their next event, leaving the panel, which was still talking, to contend with all the world’s problems.

Since Palin was introduced to the world last Friday as a reformist, no-nonsense female chief executive, her image has been clouded by the revelation of family problems (a pregnant teenage daughter, a no-good state trooper brother-in-law, a husband with a history of drinking and driving), flip-flopping problems (on “the bridge to nowhere” and the subject of earmarks), embarrassing-bedfellow problems (she served on the board of a 527 called “Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.”), and a problematic perception, overall, that she is an inexperienced, moose-skinning former beauty queen who is swimming far out of her depth.

The Alaska delegation was milling around a hotel ballroom, having just finished breakfast and dealing with an unaccustomed and unexpected onslaught of press attention.

Mr. Noll, a native New Yorker who first went to Alaska with the military and never left, was wearing a button that read “Bill Noll Supports McCain-Palin.” He pointed to the other side of the Ramada ballroom, to a woman who wore her brown hair swept up on top of her head. “See that hairdo?” Noll said. “You’re going to see that hairdo sweeping America. That’s the Sarah Palin up-do. In Alaska, I saw it just sweeping the state.”

A week ago, Sarah Palin’s name was almost unknown outside her home state. Now, thanks to McCain’s surprise strike, she’s fast becoming a—dare we say it?—celebrity, gracing the covers of magazines like Us Weekly, though perhaps not for the reasons the campaign would have liked. No vice presidential candidate in recent memory has come from so far out of left field—if the United States is Wrigley, Alaska is across Waveland Avenue—and perhaps no other’s debut has been attended by such a chaotic barrage of embarrassing disclosures. In the absence of any coordinated response from the McCain campaign, it’s so far fallen to the Alaska delegates to explain Ms. Palin, and the place they’re from, to the rest of America. Though Ms. Palin made her name by challenging Alaska’s Republican establishment—former New York Governor George Pataki, in a speech to the delegates that morning, had praised her as “someone who has taken on not just the special interests but leaders of her state, political heavies of her state, members of her own party”—the delegation to the convention, which included some of those same party leaders, has defended her, with resolute cheeriness, from all manner of hostile inquiries.

“It’s a nice feeling, it’s a warm feeling, but with the pride goes a certain feeling of responsibility,” Mr. Noll said. “It’s kind of a callous, rough world out there.”

The prior afternoon, as the convention took care of its hurricane-shortened business, dozens of cameras and tape recorders were trained on the Alaska delegation’s section of the hall, which was all the way at the back of the floor. (Everything about the state, apparently, is remote: Unlike many state delegations that are staying at luxury hotels in downtown Minneapolis, Alaska is staying at a tatty Ramada next to the Mall of America in suburban Bloomington.) Dana Bash, the CNN correspondent, stood next to the delegation and spoke live to Wolf Blitzer. “They’re very excited about the fact that we’re even standing here in front of them,” she said.

That might have been overstating things slightly: As the press swarmed, delegates fielded questions politely, and a man wearing an earpiece and a red “McCain” hat broke up conversations that went on too long. When Ms. Palin’s name was mentioned, the delegation broke into a chant of: “Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!”

“There are a few people who have said she was just a mayor of a small town,” said Rex Shattuck, the delegation coordinator. “Well, what more perfect a start can you get for a public official than dealing with the real nitty-gritty?”

In conversations, the delegates hit the same points over and over: Ms. Palin’s stratospheric approval ratings, her independent streak, her “relatable” family issues.

“I think what voters are going to discover is a certain freshness,” said Mr. Noll. “She’s got a certain genuineness that is nice.”

“I think she’s a fresh breath,” said delegate Pete Higgins.

“She’s got a very personable style,” said delegate Kim Skipper.

“You’re reading all kinds of bad stuff in the newspapers right now,” said Alaskan Republican activist George Jensen. “But they’re just common, ordinary folks who have worked all their lives.”

Describing Ms. Palin as “ordinary” was also a graceful way of acknowledging that her candidacy had hit some unprecedented bumps (ahem). Alaskans have a tight-knit, personal relationship with their politicians—“we run into them in the grocery store,” one delegate said—and Ms. Palin’s “family issues,” as the delegates called them, didn’t seem to come as a surprise. One delegate told me he knew the nastier rumors about the governor’s last pregnancy weren’t true because he was acquainted with the nurse that attended her delivery. “She’s got a family, and like all American families, it’s got challenges,” Kim Skipper said. “Did George Bush get a second term? Did his daughters have any issues with growing up in the limelight?”

“It can’t be comfortable to have your family differences spread across the front page of the newspapers,” said Ralph Seekins. “But I’m old enough to know that you better not start judging, because the difference between that person and you is that they got caught.”

Mr. Seekins, a white-haired 63-year-old, is a car dealer, former state senator and incoming Republican national committeeman. He was wearing an NRA button and an unassuming cross in his lapel. “It’s good to have a positive role model,” he went on. “There are some cracks in the veneer. If there weren’t cracks in the veneer, she wouldn’t be a real person.”

Even as Mr. Seekins spoke warmly of Ms. Palin, he also praised Senator Ted Stevens, whose recent indictment has come to represent the chummy and sometimes corrupt Alaskan political culture that Ms. Palin made her name by challenging. “Sarah and I don’t always agree on things,” he told me. “That’s Alaska. If you put 12 of us in a room, you get 13 different opinions, and we argue them passionately.”

Certainly, Ms. Palin’s uncompromising political style has reportedly made her many enemies within Alaska’s G.O.P. elite. I asked Mr. Noll whether any of them might be staying at the Ramada. He smiled cagily. “I’m not sure anybody would confess it—it’s kind of like the John McCain story,” Mr. Noll said, referring to a speech made earlier at breakfast by one of Mr. McCain’s fellow former POWs about their torture at the Hanoi Hilton. “We’re all here together.”

So, I asked, would any of the people in the room be very happy to see this anti-corruption crusader heading off to Washington?

“You guys are so cynical,” Mr. Noll said, with a hearty laugh.

arice@observer.com

At a breakfast speech before the Tennessee and Alaska Republican delegations this morning at the Pawnee Room at the Ramada Inn at the Mall of America, former New York Governor George Pataki—of all people—launched an attack on the Democratic ticket, at one point conflating the name of the opposing party’s candidate with Osama bin Laden’s.

“Do we have anybody from Tennessee here?” Pataki said as he opened his speech. “You know, you beat Al Gore in 2000. And if you beat Al Gore in 2000 you sure as heck can beat Os …” The former governor paused, seemingly for effect. “… Oh … Obama in 2008.” The line, delivered in Pataki’s familiar deadpan, appeared to be meant as a joke, and the audience took it as one, laughing, whistling and clapping.

“You know I do want to say a few serious words this morning,” Pataki went on, before embarking on a combative speech.

About Joe Biden, he said: “You know that hope and change they talked about in Denver included reforming a broken Washington. Now what is the change they picked? They picked for vice president someone who is known more for the length of his speeches than for the length of his service and has never a met an earmark he doesn’t like—now that’s the wrong kind of change and that is not the reform that the American people need.”

At the end of the speech, Pataki returned to Obama again: “I saw Senator Obama’s speech in Berlin. And one thought kept running through my mind. I believe we don’t need a citizen of the world as president of the United States. We need an American hero and an American patriot and that is Senator John McCain.”

The audience seemed primed to believe the worst about Obama. Outside the hall, a table was lined with complimentary copies of a paperback book entitled: What Does Barack Obama Believe? Why His Fictional World Should Worry Every American. The book, largely a reinterpretation of previous press accounts and Obama’s own autobiographies, questions whether Obama was an illegitimate child, dwells heavily on the racial dynamics of his parents’ relationship (“He was pitch black as she was lily white”; “Years later, her son would notice an embarrassing element of raw sexual attraction on her part to dark men.”), and alleges that “while living in Jakarta” young Obama “began creating [a] ‘nightmare vision’ of America.”

The author, Michael Patrick Leahy, alleges that the Democrats hope to establish an “Obama Liberation Theocracy,” based on the ideological belief that their candidate is a “prophet, anointed by God or a God-like figure as a natural successor to Martin Luther King, a preparatory prophet.”

UPDATE: Pataki spokesman Dave Catalfamo calls to say that Pataki "just misspoke his name."

"He just stumbled--he was not making a joke, he would never make a joke like that," said Catalfamo, who attended the speech. "There's probably a million people in American that have misspolen Barack Obama's name." (Indeed, it's a common mistake.) "It would have registed in my mind if I thought he was making a joke like that," Catalfamo went on. "It's beyond the pale. He would never do it."

What is the Aidmatrix Foundation? On Fox News, correspondent Bret Baier referred to it as “eBay for charitable contributions.” The truth appears to be somewhat less tidy.

The Aidmatrix Foundation, founded in 2000, is based in Dallas and is currently run by Scott McCallum, the former Republican governor of Wisconsin. The organization has contracts with numerous private charities and state governments, including Louisiana’s, playing a middleman role by “matching corporate surplus with charities" according to the nonpartisan Network for Good. In November 2006, after the organizational disaster of Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded the foundation a $3.5 million dollar grant to develop of a software program to streamline the process of collecting and distributing donations of money and goods after natural disasters. Democrats in Congress, including Mississippi Representative Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, have recently questioned the effectiveness of the software. Aidmatrix declined to testify at a congressional hearing on July 31.

On its web site, Aidmatrix says it distributes “more than $1.5 billion of aid annually to more than 35,000 voluntary organizations.” Tax forms, however, suggest that as of 2006—the year it received the FEMA grant, and the most recent for which such records are available—the organization had a $2 million budget, and distributed $667,000 in the form of grants. The largest single grant, to the World Food Program, amounted to $100,000. McCallum’s salary was $279,000, while the organization’s chief operating officer made $192,000.

McCallum served as Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor during the Tommy Thompson administration, and ascended to the top job when Thompson was appointed secretary of Health and Human Services by President Bush in 2001. He failed in a bid to win a full term in 2002, and went on to become CEO of Aidmatrix, reportedly saying: “Why would I want to be in politics when I can save the world?”

The Aidmatrix Foundation’s tax returns for 2004 through 2006 can be found here, here and here.

A middle-aged couple, members of the Georgia delegation, discuss the news that Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol is pregnant.

Her: “I guess it’s not so bad if the guy is 17. It’s not like he’s older, right?”

Him: “I wouldn’t know. I abstained until I was 24.”

Her: “We were dating when you were 24.”

Him: “Right.”

Laughter fills the back of the bus.