Their almost uniformly hysterical response to President Obama's decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 terrorists to New York to face charges in federal court illustrates this vividly.

John Boehner, the top Republican in the House, called it "further evidence that the White House is reverting to a dangerous pre-9/11 mentality." Rudy Giuliani went on national television to warn that residents of New York - his own city - would be at increased risk because of it. And John Shadegg, a leader of the most conservative faction of House Republicans, actually wondered how Mayor Bloomberg (who has endorsed Obama's move) will feel "when it's your daughter that's kidnapped at school by a terrorist?"

The G.O.P.'s heat on this issue stems partly from the Islamophobia that has infected the right. This past week alone has brought us Bill O'Reilly noting that "we can't kill all the Muslims" and Don Manzullo, a Republican congressman from Illinois, calling Islam "a savage religion."

But it's impossible to ignore the crude, cynical political calculations that are also at work.

On the issue of the Mohammed trial, the G.O.P. has identified an issue that - at least in the short term - is a political winner. It's only too easy to stoke public fear an anxiety about the 46 million things (real or imagined) that could go wrong by bringing five deadly terrorists to the largest city in America for a high-profile trial.

Already, polls show that blue state New Yorkers are split on the matter, with about as many opposing the trial plan as support it. Imagine what the numbers are in swing and red states. And imagine what they'll be - in New York and around the country - after a few weeks of Shadegg-esque fear-mongering.

There are, of course, rational answers to all of the right's objections about the trial. Like the fact that terrorists have been tried in federal courts many times before and have been convicted at a rate of about 90 percent. Or that a terrorist incident has never coincided with one of these trials. Or that New York itself has actually played host to terrorist trials before. Or that even Republicans - like Giuliani - celebrated the 2006 federal conviction of the so-called 20^th hijacker as a tribute to the American system of justice. And on and on.

But rational thought isn't always a strong weapon when matched against fear. So the G.O.P. is well-positioned to score points with its blistering attacks on the trial issue - at least in the short term.

Which brings us back to the idea that Republicans are making a morbid bet. Because the short-term efficacy of their terror trial fear campaign will cease to work - and in fact will backfire - if the trials end up proceeding in orderly fashion and producing guilty verdicts. Then, the administration will be free to celebrate the triumph of the American system - and to remind the public, over and over, how afraid Republicans were to place their faith in our system. There won't be much for the G.O.P. to say in response.

But Republicans will have plenty to say if some sort of terrorist incident coincides with the trial - or if one occurs at any other point in Obama's first term. Then, they'll be the ones saying they told us so.

In that sense, their terror trial hysteria is merely an extension of a game plan Republicans have been following since Obama was inaugurated. They have missed no opportunity to portray any foreign policy or national security decision he makes - even over something as trivial as whether to bow when greeting the Japanese emperor - as a sign that he's "soft" on terrorism and security.

So we have Dick Cheney and John McCain sounding the alarm over Obama's "dithering" on Afghanistan, with right-wing media outlets piling on (even as sober, rational voices like Colin Powell insist that Obama should take his time and not be rushed into making a decision on troop levels). We have Karl Rove (and countless others) accusing Obama of being on an "apology tour" when he visits other world leaders. And we have the present craziness over terror trials.

In ways big and small, the G.O.P.'s game is to paint Obama as weak and soft. The long-term calculation is undeniable: the more noise Republicans make now about Obama's supposed "softness" on terrorism, the more it will resonate with voters in the event that there is another major terrorist incident during his presidency.

To be fair, there are some conservatives who aren't interested in playing this game (just as there are some Democrats who have joined in). "The scaremongering about these issues should stop," conservative leaders David Keene, Grover Norquist and Bob Barr said in a statement this week. 

Maybe Keene, Norquist and Barr (the Libertarian nominee for president last year) are genuinely offended by what's going on. But from a political standpoint, they probably also recognize it as a bad bet - one that leaves Obama trying to keep the country safe and his political opponents hoping that he can't.

Here's a new piece of Michael Bloomberg campaign literature featuring two things you won't see on Bill Thompson's pieces anytime soon: Colin Powell and the New York Post logo.

I didn't see it being handed out at the parade in Brooklyn yesterday, but if you get it, let me know where it's being distributed.

Here’s a transcript of Powell’s remarks (courtesy of the Bloomberg campaign):

KING: So you leave New York, but New York never leaves you. Therefore, do you have a thought about the Mayor's race?

POWELL: Of course, yes. I think that Mike Bloomberg has done a tremendous job in his eight years as the Mayor. In 2005, when he was running for his second term, I was asked about this and I said, I am a Virginian now, but if I lived in New York, I would vote for Mike Bloomberg.

Well, he has managed now to run for a third term, and I feel even more strongly about it. I think he is a great candidate. I think what he has done for education, what he has done to manage the economic problems New York is having, what he has done for safety, what he has done for tourism, he is an independent guy who is always trying to solve problems.

And he is working for the whole city. So I think Mike Bloomberg should be given a third term. And yes, I would say, reelect Mike Bloomberg.

To look back at the media's 100-day reviews for the previous five presidents is to recognize a pattern: overall assessments generally break along the expected partisan and ideological lines, but are typically tinged with at least some optimism; no one wants to be accused of rendering a final verdict too soon.

But, whether they've been framed in a positive or negative light, the media's early reviews generally have succeeded in capturing the various policy and stylistic trends that went on to determine the success or failure of each presidency.

For instance, the early reviews for Jimmy Carter were, on the whole, favorable. After 100 days in office in 1977, he scored a 64 percent approval rating, which pollsters chalked up to a surge in support from conservatives who had voted against Carter in 1976 but who had warmed to his governing style. In The New York Times, Hedrik Smith hailed Carter for his ability to rally the nation around him after defeating Gerald Ford by barely two points the previous fall.

At the same time, analysts also correctly noted several early warning signs that would ultimately metastasize and cripple Carter's presidency—most notably, his difficulties in dealing with his own party's Congressional leaders and his conservative fiscal policies, which didn't sit well with organized labor and liberal activists (who would eventually rally around Ted Kennedy in his primary campaign against Carter in 1980). In that sense, the early verdict on Carter—that people wanted to like him but that his own party could be the source of his biggest headaches—proved accurate.

The early review for George W. Bush exhibited similar prescience, which is somewhat surprising considering that no one in April 2001 could or should have anticipated the 9/11 attacks, an event around Bush framed virtually all of his decisions for the rest of his presidency.

Consider a Times editorial on Bush's 100^th day in his office, which offered plenty of the obligatory courtesy that most presidents receive from their ideological opposites early in their terms. And so, The Times noted that Bush's "sunny self-confidence, even his penchant for bankers' hours and long weekends, seems to sit well with many Americans. It is a relief, they seem to be saying, to have a president who is not so tiring and omnipresent as Mr. Clinton."

But the paper also homed in on one of the biggest question marks surrounding the new president: "The issue of how Mr. Bush will handle America's role in the world is far from settled."

"One situation to watch," the editorial continued, "will be the eventual outcome of the tussles between Secretary of State Colin Powell as the diplomatic moderate and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who seems inclined to analyze the world in terms of historic or emerging military threats. Right now, Vice President Dick Cheney is perceived as more in Mr. Rumsfeld's camp, and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, perhaps more in Mr. Powell's."

Once 9/11 occurred and foreign policy monopolized Bush's agenda, this exact internal conflict came to the fore—with the Cheney and Rumsfeld side winning out, while Powell reluctantly went along with them before leaving the administration after one term. It's anyone's guess how differently the Bush presidency would have played out, and how different the world itself might now look, had Cheney, Rumsfeld and their allies lost the post-9/11 battle for their boss' heart.

While the threats to Carter's and Bush's standing were mostly theoretical after 100 days, Bill Clinton's problems were far more immediate, something the media had no trouble picking up on. At the end of April 1993, Clinton was sporting wobbly approval ratings, the lowest for a newly elected president in the modern era, with the public increasingly convinced that he was trying to do too many things all at once—and doing all of them badly.

"President Clinton promised to focus like a ‘laser' on the economy," a Washington Post story read, "but the first 100 days of his administration have looked more like a light show, flickering from Russian aid to national service, the reinvention of government to gays in the military to Bosnia."

The Post added that "despite the unparalleled forum of the White House and a mandate for activism, Clinton has moved few Americans to his side beyond the 43 percent who voted for him. He stands with historically high disapproval ratings and approval ratings among the lowest of any elected president at this point in his term." And The Christian Science Monitor noted that "Republicans look at Clinton's problems and rub their hands. Sen. Phil Gramm (R) of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, already talks about the GOP regaining a majority in the Senate in 1994."

We now remember Clinton's two-term presidency as largely popular and successful, marred only by a Republican-led impeachment drive that incurred the ire of most voters. But the generally gloomy tone of Clinton's early reviews was spot-on; more chaos and legislative disappointment (the death of his ballyhooed health care plan in 1994) followed for the next 18 months, culminating in the Republicans' stunning triumph in the '94 midterm elections, in which they won not only the Senate but also the House, for the first time in 40 years.

The arbitrary significance of the 100-day mark makes it easy to dismiss the glut of media stories as gimmicky and meaningless. But history shows they are worth reading—as long as you read them closely.

Today, Ms. Dowd set aside her Pulitzer-winning bells and whistles to talk to former Secretary of State Colin Powell about his endorsement of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama:

Mr. Powell told Ms. Dowd, "I stared at it for an hour... Who could debate that this kid lying in Arlington with Christian and Jewish and nondenominational buddies was not a fine American?"

No one would really dare make the point that a Muslim or Arab can't be a fine American, right? Well, no one besides Republican presidential nominee John McCain, who told an audience in Minnesota in early October that Senator Obama is not an Arab, but rather, "He's a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign's all about. He's not." You can see a video here. (And let's not even bring up the strange matter of Senator McCain's campaign aide Daniel Zubairi—a proud Muslim who has spoken out against campaign supporters' intolerance and for the Republican candidate and his running mate—yet was yanked from a CNN appearance, which according to The Huffington Post's Sam Stein "mystified" CNN's Rick Sanchez.)

After telling a bit more about Mr. Rashad, who wanted to enlist since he was 14-years-old and whose father told a reporter, "He looked at it that he’s American and he has a job to do," Ms. Dowd writes that Mr. Powell received an email blast "from a man wanting to spread the word that Obama was reading a book about the end of America written by a fellow Muslim."

That book? The Post-American World by Newsweek International editor and columnist, Fareed Zakaria, a man whose name was once bandied about as a possible Secretary of State and who told The Village Voice's Joy Press in 2005, "I occasionally find myself reluctant to be pulled into a world that's not mine, in the sense that I'm not a religious guy."

As Maureeen Dowd might say in a more playful column, Mr. Zakaria is like Michael Corleone in Godfather III: Every time he thinks he's out, they keep pulling him back in.

The overprivileged grifters in the Bush family unaccountably had Powell's loyalty, so he could not walk away from their party until their day was done. But when Tom Brokaw asked him to explain why he supports Barack Obama, whose plan to end the war in Iraq is supposedly anathema to Powell, his answer was glib and unsatisfactory.

He noted, correctly, that the new status of forces agreement with the Iraqi government essentially requires the United States to withdraw more or less on Obama's schedule. But he is still clinging to the flimsy old rationale for the war -- and pretending that he didn't know what was really going on, namely that George W. Bush was determined to invade and occupy Iraq no matter what the intelligence might prove. If the British knew that in the summer of 2002, then Powell must have known, too. The chain of logic in this endorsement cannot be elided so easily. If Powell is supporting Obama because of the Illinois senator's "judgment," isn't he accepting the argument that Obama made the right decision on the most important national security issue of the past five years?

For a glimpse of the former John McCain, the man for whom Powell declared his love even as he endorsed Obama, it is worth watching the video of the Al Smith dinner, an uplifting tradition of American politics that elevates wit over demagogy. This is the senator whose candor and decency charmed so many of the people who met him, at least in public. If the Smith dinner speeches were judged like a debate, McCain would have prevailed easily, although Obama was certainly funny enough on his first outing at the white-tie affair. His elegance and eloquence carry him along in any circumstance. But hearing McCain speak so genuinely about Obama, it becomes painfully obvious why his devolution in this campaign is so unfortunate, and why it is impossible to believe that he believes the things he is now saying every day.

The roots of Powell’s popularity—his inspiring personal story and his highly visible leadership during the 1991 Gulf War—are understandable, but its endurance is somewhat puzzling. This is the same guy who allowed the Bush administration to harness his sterling reputation to sell the Iraq war to the American public.

Publicly, Powell doesn’t sound much different than George W. Bush when the subject of the war is raised, and this was true when Powell appeared on Meet the Press. Asked by Tom Brokaw about his role as the “closer” in the administration’s campaign for war, Powell allowed only, “I regret a lot of the information that the intelligence community provided us was wrong.”

“The president, by the end of 2002, believed that the U.N. was not going to solve the problem, and he made a decision that we had to prepare for military action,” Powell said. “I fully supported that. And I have never said anything to suggest I did not support going to war. I thought the evidence was there.”

He also challenged the importance of his presentation to the United Nations in early 2003, noting that large majorities in the House and Senate had already authorized the war months earlier—the same “blame Congress” card that the war’s fiercest defenders are quick to play.

And yet more than five years after the war was launched, with Bush’s approval rating below 30 percent and an overwhelming majority of Americans satisfied that the war should never have been waged, Powell remains a lionized figure.

Just consider the implications of his Obama endorsement. On a basic level, Powell’s status as a leader who transcends partisan and ideological divides ensured that his declaration would dominate political news coverage and discussion at the start of the second-to-last full week of the presidential campaign. Plus, his authority on national security issues will only boost the confidence of swing voters who want to vote for Obama but who worry about his seasoning.

But more important than either of these factors is Powell’s moral authority. Across the political spectrum, he is viewed as deeply patriotic and unusually principled, a political figure who is above politics. In announcing his endorsement, Powell used that moral authority to shame the McCain campaign and the Republican Party for the tone of the campaign.

”John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know,” Powell said, “but I’m troubled that within the party we have these kinds of expressions.”

If Powell were the only person making this point, it would be one thing. But the personal nature of the attacks by McCain’s supporters—and, at times, by McCain and Sarah Palin themselves—has received much attention lately. This has hurt McCain with many white swing voters, who used to view McCain as an honorable politician and who don’t wish to associate themselves with a party that seems to be flirting with racial politics. Powell is amplifying—maybe dramatically—the concerns of these voters.

The fact that Powell’s endorsement is such a thorough triumph for Obama, though, only underscores how successful Powell’s own image maintenance effort has been these past few years. With the possible exception of Condoleezza Rice, every other prominent Bush administration official connected with the Iraq war has paid a price in terms of his or her reputation. But even though Powell’s comments on the run-up to the war sound an awful lot like Bush’s—we tried diplomacy, we had credible intelligence reports, and anyway none of it would have happened without Congress—he has paid no discernible price.

There are a few reasons for this. One is that Powell has been publicly critical of the mechanics of the war—troop levels, in particular—and, now that he’s a private citizen, has called for more aggressive diplomacy than the administration has been willing to pursue. He also probably gets the benefit of the doubt from many Americans who simply believe that Powell was duped just like everyone else—that Bush and his inner circle are the real bad guys.

But there’s another factor that’s worth noting: Powell’s apparent willingness to say off the record what he won’t say in public. Since his days in the first Bush administration, for instance, it’s been an open secret that Powell cooperates willingly with Bob Woodward when the Washington Post journalist writes his insider accounts. That cooperation has consistently paid off for Powell, with Woodward typically portraying him, as The New York Times put it when Woodward’s Plan of Attack came out in 2004, “as a farsighted analyst, perhaps at the expense of [President] Bush.”

Essentially, Powell has used Woodward and others to liberate himself from responsibility for just about everything that has been unpopular about the Iraq war. So while Powell was a loyal soldier in public, a narrative has emerged that painted him as a frustrated and marginalized voice of sanity in an administration awash in neoconservative nonsense. It’s an idea that has taken hold in popular culture: W., the movie from the imaginative Oliver Stone, depicts Powell hurling taunts at Dick Cheney that could have been written by a Daily Kos commenter.

This has made it easy for Americans to excuse Powell from culpability instead of demanding to know why he never aired any of his doubts in public before the war started. And it makes his endorsement of a presidential candidate who made his reservations about the war known five months before it started extremely valuable.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Thursday referred to "pro-America areas" of the country, seeming to imply that the label was synonymous with political conservatism. The following day, Representative Michelle Bachmann asserted on MSNBC's Hardball that Obama "may have anti-American views."

Axelrod, who spoke to me as Obama addressed a crowd of approximately 10,000 at the Crown Center Coliseum here, asserted that Powell is "seen as an American statesman, and people understand that. When he makes an endorsement, he makes it from the standpoint of the country."

Axelrod also said that Powell's endorsement might be "a source of encouragement" for voters who had hitherto harbored doubts about supporting Obama. "And for Republicans who are disaffected, I think he articulated their views very, very well," he said.

The Obama team has been buoyed by unusually large crowds in recent days – including 100,000 who gathered beneath the Gateway Arch in St. Louis yesterday, making that rally the largest domestic event of the campaign to date—and by a record-breaking fund-raising haul of more than $150 million for the month of September.

Axelrod asserted that one of the reasons for the late-breaking increase in grass-roots enthusiasm was the nature of the Republican campaign, which he claimed had been negative to a counterproductive degree.

"There are a lot of voters who are disgusted with the tone of the Republican campaign, and part of that has been manifested in increased small donations to our campaign," Axelrod told me. "I think Senator McCain and Governor Palin have helped us immeasurably. I don't necessarily think it's good for the country, but I think people are expressing themselves by volunteering, by showing up at rallies and by contributing to the campaign."

Obama himself spoke to Powell around 10 a.m., the campaign said. In addition to thanking the former secretary of state for his endorsement, Obama told Powell during the 10-minute conversation that he looked forward to taking his advice up until the election and "hopefully" over the next four years.

Obama also opened his speech here by paying tribute to Powell: "This morning, a great soldier, a great statesman, and a great American has endorsed our campaign to change America. I have been honored to have the benefit of his wisdom and counsel from time to time over the last few years, but today, I am beyond honored and deeply humbled to have the support of General Colin Powell," he said.

Obama also addressed the attacks upon his sense of patriotism: "We can have a tough contest … but we've got to have a line that we don't cross," he said. "There are no real or fake parts of this country. We are not separated by the pro-America and anti-America parts of this nation—we all love this country, no matter where we live or where we come from."

Obama told the crowd that such attacks were an attempt to distract voters from the real issues.

"No matter what they do, you will have the chance to walk into that voting booth, and close that curtain, and say, 'Not this time. Not this year,'" he said, to cheers.