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The next night, wanting to give the American people something more tangible, John Kerry offered his own pledge, one intended as the ticket’s new slogan: “Help is on the way.” But Mr. Edwards did not want to say it.  So the running mates set off across the country together with different messages, sometimes delivered at the same rally: Mr. Kerry leading the crowd in chants for “help,” Mr. Edwards for “hope.” The campaign printed two sets of signs. By November, the disagreement had been so institutionalized that campaign workers handed out fans with both messages, on flip sides.

To the end of their disappointing run, the two men were unable to agree on the script, whether for slogans or more substantive matters. And like so many political marriages, the one between Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards — Senate colleagues who became rivals then running mates but never really friends — ended in recrimination and regrets.

Kerry aides complain that Mr. Edwards never stopped running for president — a Democratic Party official recalled some aides wearing “Edwards for President” pins at a fund-raiser long after they were working for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. Kerry supporters say Mr. Edwards refused to play the traditional vice-presidential role of attack dog even going up against a purebred, Dick Cheney. And Mr. Kerry had barely conceded the race, they say, before Mr. Edwards was aiming for 2008 and embarking on what one campaign aide called the “it wasn’t my fault tour” around his home state to distance himself from the loss.

For his part, aides said, Mr. Edwards felt frustrated by Mr. Kerry’s public agonizing over the war in Iraq and a campaign that seemed to change consultants and message constantly. To Mr. Edwards, Mr. Kerry seemed unable to get out of his own way. He ignored Mr. Edwards’s warning not to go windsurfing, one aide recalled, which led to the infamous “whichever way the wind blows” advertisement mocking Mr. Kerry’s statements on the war. And in the end, Mr. Edwards concluded that Mr. Kerry lacked fight for not filing a legal challenge to the election results.

Today, Mr. Edwards insists he is “the same person I’ve always been.” But his experience as a vice-presidential candidate who went down in defeat has clearly influenced his current run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Having seen up close the perils of seeming to shift with the wind, he is selling himself as the candidate of “conviction” and “bold ideas” and trying to portray the front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as tacking for political gain. Once the sunny centrist who did not want to criticize his rivals by name, Mr. Edwards has become the most confrontational candidate in the race. And he has courted his party’s left wing by renouncing his vote on the war, something he counseled Mr. Kerry not to do.

“There’s no question John Edwards is different now than he was in 2004,” said Peter Scher, whom Mr. Kerry recruited to run Mr. Edwards’s vice-presidential campaign. “There’s a great deal more confidence in his own instincts and his own judgment. You see much less reliance on consultants and pollsters and media advisers, and more of a willingness to say what he believes and let the chips fall where they may.”

Kerry loyalists, meanwhile, seethe as they watch his new aggressiveness. Stephanie Cutter, who was Mr. Kerry’s communications director, said, “A lot of what I’m seeing now, I wish I’d seen in 2004.”

Mr. Edwards defends his change in tone, calling it the result of “a maturing process.”

“I believe that presidential candidates actually have a responsibility to point out substantive differences, to point out perspectives that are different,” he said in an interview. “I’m totally comfortable doing it.”

By KATE ZERNIKE

Published: November 21, 2007

NEW YORK — A jury ruled Tuesday that New York Knicks coach Isiah Thomas sexually harassed a top team executive, subjecting the married mother of three to unwanted advances and a barrage of verbal insults.

But the jury also ruled that Thomas does not have to pay punitive damages to the woman, giving him a partial victory after an ugly, three-week trial.

The jury did find that Madison Square Garden committed harassment against the woman, and ruled that she is entitled to punitive damages from MSG.

U.S. District Judge Gerard E. Lynch called it an “imminently reasonable” verdict and said the jury will be asked to return later in the day to hear brief arguments on punitive damages against MSG.

After the verdict, the plaintiff hugged family members and friends gathered in the back of the courtroom.

The harassment verdict was widely expected after the jury sent a note to the judge Monday indicating that it believed Thomas and the other defendants, Madison Square Garden and MSG Chairman James Dolan, sexually harassed plaintiff Anucha Browne Sanders. But the question of whether Thomas would have to pay punitive damages was up in the air until Tuesday.

Browne Sanders, fired from her $260,000 a year job in 2006, sued Thomas and Madison Square Garden for $10 million. Her case presented the Garden as “Animal House” in sneakers, a place where nepotism, sexism, crude remarks and crass language were part of the culture.

The former Northwestern college basketball star characterized Thomas as a foul-mouthed lout who initially berated her as a “bitch” and a “ho” before his anger gave way to ardor, with Thomas making unwanted advances and encouraging her to visit him “off site.”

Thomas, who was hired in December 2003, followed her to the stand and denied all her allegations. Attorneys for Thomas and the Garden also portrayed Browne Sanders as incompetent and unable to adapt once the NBA great arrived as the Knicks’ president.

“That’s not about sexual harassment,” MSG attorney Ronald Green said in his closing argument. “That’s about team politics.”

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: October 2, 2007

Surpassing her rivals by a margin that few Democrats predicted, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign announced this morning that it had raised $22 million since July to compete in the 2008 primaries, and another $5 million for the general election should she win her party’s nomination.

The Clinton campaign kept the figure a secret throughout Monday as her leading rival, Senator Barack Obama, announced that he had raised $19 million for the primaries and another $1 million for the general election.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have been vying aggressively against each other for donors and fund-raising bragging rights this year. Mr. Obama had raised slightly more money than Mrs. Clinton during the second quarter, April through June; in recent weeks Clinton advisers and donors had asserted that he was probably on track to beat her again because his campaign was publicizing his success at recruiting new donors.

Mr. Obama announced Monday that he had attracted more than 93,000 new donors over the last three months and that he met his goal for this period of signing up more than 350,000 donors overall this year.
The Clinton campaign said this morning that it had drawn more than 100,000 new donors over the last three months, and declared, in a statement from campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, that it had raised “substantially more than any other candidate in the race.”

Clinton advisers attributed the fundraising success to Mrs. Clinton’s steady performance as a candidate this summer and fall, including her well-reviewed appearances in the presidential debates and her emergence, in many opinion polls, as the leading candidate in the Democratic field. The campaign also had a busy calendar of fund-raising events, including successful receptions in the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket this fall, as well as in California. It was unclear this morning how much of the $27 million in total dollars was raised online.

In a message to donors, Ms. Solis Doyle said: “This is the moment when you showed that America is ready for change and that you are ready to make history. This is the moment when your dedication defied the skeptics.”

Mrs. Clinton’s success came in spite of weeks of embarrassing
headlines for her campaign in August and September about one of her
top donors, Norman Hsu, who was revealed to be a con man and fugitive
from the law in California. Mr. Hsu, who is now facing new criminal charges related to his business practices and Democratic fund-raising tactics, raised and contributed nearly $900,000 for Mrs. Clinton this year.
The Clinton campaign returned about $850,000 to the individual donors
that Mr. Hsu solicited, and gave the rest — money that Mr. Hsu had
given her over the years — to charity.

The Clinton campaign also made its announcement on the same day that
Mr. Obama is set to deliver a foreign policy address, in Chicago, on
the fifth anniversary of his speech opposing a possible invasion of
Iraq. Mr. Obama has cited that 2002 speech as evidence for Democrats
that he has better judgment than Mrs. Clinton, who voted this month
five years ago to authorize military action against Iraq.

Bill Burton, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, released a statement after the Clinton camp made its announcement.

“More than 350,000 Americans have already signaled the kind of change they want in Washington by contributing to the Obama campaign,” Mr. Burton said. “We have raised a historic $74.9 million in dollars available for primary spending, without transferring one cent from any other campaign fund and with no money from federal lobbyists or PACs.”

Mrs. Clinton has raised more than $60 million for the primaries, and contributed another $10 million from her Senate account, putting her roughly on par with the amount of money Mr. Obama has raised for the primaries, $74.9 million.

A fundraising analyst, Costas Panagopoulos of Fordham University, said this morning that the Clinton fund-raising total is likely to convey an impression of superiority to voters than Mr. Obama will have to battle against.

“Clinton’s blow-away third quarter fundraising total is likely to have, among other things, a profound psychological effect on voters,” Mr. Panagopoulos said. “It will give the impression of growing Clinton strength — both in terms of dollars and number of donors.”

“Obama also raised impressive sums,” he added, “but he may be seen as languishing relative to previous quarters. Obama’s lackluster third quarter intake, relative to previous quarters, reflects, at least in part, waning enthusiasm for his candidacy and diminishing prospects for an Obama victory.”

Patrick Henry and Francis Scott Key are out, but Susan B. Anthony and Nancy Pelosi are in. The White House was cut, but New York and Sept. 11 made the list.

Federal immigration authorities yesterday unveiled 100 new questions immigrants will have to study to pass a civics test to become naturalized American citizens.

The redesign of the test, the first since it was created in 1986 as a standardized examination, follows years of criticism in which conservatives said the test was too easy and immigrant advocates said it was too hard.

The new questions did little to quell that debate among many immigrant groups, who complained that the citizenship test would become even more daunting. Conservatives seemed to be more satisfied.

Bush administration officials said the new test was part of their effort to move forward on the hotly disputed issue of immigration by focusing on the assimilation of legal immigrants who have played by the rules, leaving aside the situation of some 12 million illegal immigrants here.

Several historians said the new questions successfully incorporated more ideas about the workings of American democracy and better touched upon the diversity of the groups — including women, American Indians and African-Americans — who have influenced the country’s history.

Would-be citizens no longer have to know who said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” or who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But they do have to know what Susan B. Anthony did and who the speaker of the House of Representatives is.

Alfonso Aguilar, a senior official at Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that designs and administers the test, said it was not intended to be punitive.

“We don’t seek to fail anyone,” said Mr. Aguilar, an architect of the test.

Immigration officials said they sought to move away from civics trivia to emphasize basic concepts about the structure of government and American history and geography. In contrast to the old test, which some immigrants could pass without any study, the officials said the new one is intended to force even highly educated applicants to do reviewing.

“This test genuinely talks about what makes an American citizen,” said Emilio Gonzalez, the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, speaking at a news conference in Washington.

The $6.5 million redesign was shaped over six years of discussions with historians, immigrant organizations and liberal and conservative research groups. The questions were submitted to four months of pilot testing this year with more than 6,000 immigrants who were applying for naturalization.

The agency will begin to use the revised test on Oct. 1, 2008, leaving a year for aspiring citizens to prepare and for community groups to adjust their study classes.

The overall format has not changed. Legal immigrants who are eligible to become citizens must pass the civics exam as well as a test of English proficiency in reading and writing. In a one-on-one oral examination, an immigration officer asks the applicant 10 questions of varying degrees of difficulty selected from the list of 100. To pass, the applicant must answer 6 of those 10 questions correctly. The questions released yesterday will remain public along with their answers.

Immigrants are eligible to become citizens if they have been legal permanent residents for at least five years (or three years if they are married to a citizen) and have “good moral character” and no criminal record.

In the pilot runs of the revised test, Mr. Aguilar said, the pass rates improved over the current tests, with 92 percent of participants passing on the first try, as opposed to 84 percent now. At least 15 questions were eliminated as a result of the pilot because they proved too difficult. For example, a question about the minimum wage was dropped because test takers were confused between federal and state rates, Mr. Aguilar said.

In the new test, the pilgrims have been replaced by “colonists,” and they are the subject of fewer questions, while slavery and the civil rights movement are the subject of more. A question was added asking what “major event” happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

The new test drops questions about the 49th and 50th states, but adds one about the political affiliation of the president. There are no questions about the White House. Instead, one question asks where the Statue of Liberty is.

In a statement today, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, one of the groups consulted in shaping the new test, denounced it as “the final brick in the second wall.” The group said the test included “more abstract and irrelevant questions” that tended to stump hard-working immigrants who had little time to study.

But several historians said the test appeared to be fair.

“People who take this seriously will have a good chance of passing,” said Gary Gerstle, a professor of American history at Vanderbilt University. “Indeed, their knowledge of American history may even exceed the knowledge of millions of American-born citizens.”

John Fonte, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, called the new test “a definite improvement.” But he said it should have included questions about the meaning of the oath of allegiance that new citizens swear. “I would like to see an even more vigorous emphasis on Americanization,” he said.

About 55 percent of the applicants who participated in the pilot test were from Latin American countries. Some Latino groups noted yesterday that no question on the new test refers to Latinos.

Mr. Aguilar said that the test was not intended to be a comprehensive review, but rather to include “landmark moments of American history that apply to every single citizen.”

Naturalizations have surged in recent years, to 702,589 last year from 537,151 in 2004, according to official figures. In July the fees to become a citizen increased sharply, to $675 from $405.

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WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — The American security contractor Blackwater USA has been involved in a far higher rate of shootings while guarding American diplomats in Iraq than other security firms providing similar services to the State Department, according to Bush administration officials and industry officials.

Blackwater is now the focus of investigations in both Baghdad and Washington over a Sept. 16 shooting in which at least 11 Iraqis were killed. Beyond that episode, the company has been involved in cases in which its personnel fired weapons while guarding State Department officials in Iraq at least twice as often per convoy mission as security guards working for other American security firms, the officials said.

The disclosure came as the Pentagon said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates had sent a team of officials to Iraq to get answers to questions about the use of American security contractors there.

The State Department keeps reports on each case in which weapons were fired by security personnel guarding American diplomats in Iraq. Officials familiar with the internal State Department reports would not provide the actual statistics, but they indicated that the records showed that Blackwater personnel were involved in dozens of episodes in which they had resorted to force.

The officials said that Blackwater’s incident rate was at least twice that recorded by employees of DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, the two other United States-based security firms that have been contracted by the State Department to provide security for diplomats and other senior civilians in Iraq.

The State Department would not comment on most matters relating to Blackwater, citing the current investigation. But Sean McCormack, the department’s spokesman, said that of 1,800 escort missions by Blackwater this year, there had been “only a very small fraction, very small fraction, that have involved any sort of use of force.”

In 2005, DynCorp reported 32 shootings during about 3,200 convoy missions, and in 2006 that company reported 10 episodes during about 1,500 convoy missions. While comparable Blackwater statistics were not available, government officials said the firm’s rate per convoy mission was about twice DynCorp’s.

The State Department’s incident reports have not been made public, and Blackwater refused to provide its own data on cases in which its personnel used their weapons while guarding American diplomats. The State Department is in the process of providing at least some of the data to Congress. The administration and industry officials who agreed to discuss the broad rate of Blackwater’s involvement in violent events would not disclose the specific numbers.

“The incident rate for Blackwater is higher, there is a distinction,” said a senior American government official who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss a delicate, continuing investigation. “The real question that is open for discussion is why.”

A Blackwater spokeswoman declined to comment.

Blackwater, based in North Carolina, has gained a reputation among Iraqis and even among American military personnel serving in Iraq as a company that flaunts an aggressive, quick-draw image that leads its security personnel to take excessively violent actions to protect the people they are paid to guard. After the latest shooting, the Iraqi government demanded that the company be banned from operating in the country.

“You can find any number of people, particularly in uniform, who will tell you that they do see Blackwater as a company that promotes a much more aggressive response to things than other main contractors do,” a senior American official said.

Today, Blackwater operates in the most violent parts of Iraq and guards the most prominent American diplomats, which some American government officials say explains why it is involved in more shootings than its competitors. The shootings included in the reports include all cases in which weapons are fired, including those meant as warning shots. Others add that Blackwater’s aggressive posture in guarding diplomats reflects the wishes of its client, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

Still, other government officials say that Blackwater’s corporate culture seems to encourage excessive behavior. “Is it the operating environment or something specific about Blackwater?” asked one government official. “My best guess is that it is both.”

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 — A proposal that Democrats put forward as their best chance of changing the course of the Iraq war died on the Senate floor on Wednesday, as Republicans stood firmly with President Bush.

The Reach of War

With other war initiatives seemingly headed for the same fate, Senate Democrats, who only two weeks ago proclaimed September to be the month for shifting course in Iraq, conceded that they had little chance of success.

They said their strategy would now focus on portraying Republicans as opposing any change and on trying to chip away support for the White House as the war continued.

The proposal that failed Wednesday fell 4 votes short of the 60 needed to prevent a filibuster and would have required that troops be given as much time at home as they had spent overseas before being redeployed.

There were 56 votes in favor, including 6 Republicans — one fewer than the 7 Republicans who joined the Democrats in July, when the measure, by Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, also fell 4 votes short.

Supporters of Mr. Bush’s war strategy declared victory, saying they had firmly beaten back legislative efforts to change course.

“It means that Congress will not intervene in the foreseeable future,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Independent who has voted with the Republicans on war issues. “The fact that it didn’t get enough votes says that Congress doesn’t have the votes to stop this strategy of success from going forward.”

The Senate vote was a crucial test of the war plan that Mr. Bush put forward last week, calling for only gradual reductions in troop levels in Iraq from their current high, and leaving intact by next summer a main body of more than 130,000 troops, about the same number as last February.

The outcome showed that the strong opposition to the war plan by Democrats and a few Republicans remained insufficient to overcome a powerful Republican minority in the Senate that has succeeded all year in staving off challenges to the war policy.

For now, the failed Webb proposal is the closest Democrats have come to bipartisan legislation that would force Mr. Bush to change his strategy. And with Republicans solidly behind the plan outlined by Mr. Bush and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, Democrats have retreated to a firm antiwar stance.

They are no longer entertaining the kind of compromise measures that some Democrats had proposed this month as an attempt to woo Republican defectors, and they said they would instead seek opportunities to hold votes that would more starkly contrast Republican support for the president with Democrats’ demands for withdrawal.

“The Republican leadership and the White House is getting them all to march in line,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who ranks third in the party leadership. “But it is marching further and further away from where America is. We just keep at it. It’s all we can do.”

Democratic strategists and party officials said that Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, and his colleagues decided to stop trying to strike a deal with Republicans after they found little interest on the other side and could not settle on a plan that would appeal to Republicans but was tough enough to hold Democrats together.

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Mr. Reid, said the majority leader was rebuffed repeatedly in his efforts to find consensus with the Republicans.

“It became evident that Republicans were not willing to break with the president,” he said.

Democrats said Mr. Webb’s proposal, if approved, would have added time between deployments, forced the withdrawal of troops on a substantially swifter timeline and, they said, protect troops from serving protracted and debilitating deployments.

On Thursday and Friday, the Senate is expected to vote on several other war proposals by the Democrats, including one by Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, that would require most American troops to be pulled out of Iraq by next June and would then cut financing for continuing military operations.

Another proposal by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, would require a shift of American troops away from combat by next summer. Mr. Reid’s spokesman said the decision to stick with a hard deadline for withdrawal was endorsed by Mr. Levin, who earlier had signaled a willingness to soften his proposal to win Republican converts.

Neither the Feingold plan nor the Levin initiative has much chance of winning 60 votes.

The Senate will also vote on a plan by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, that calls for a greater reliance on diplomacy to forge a political solution in Iraq and end the war.

But Democrats seemed resigned to having little chance of influencing the war strategy anytime soon.

After the vote, a dejected Mr. Webb said: “You are seeing, as of a week ago, the administration and some of the leading Republicans in here talking about, ‘Hey it’s O.K. that we’re going to be in Iraq for the next 50 years.’ I don’t think it is O.K.”

He continued: “And so we are going to have this debate. It is going to be a long and emotional debate, long meaning in months and perhaps years.”

Mr. Webb’s plan came under sharp attack by the Pentagon, which said it would interfere with complex troop deployment schedules, and late last week the administration put intense pressure on Republican lawmakers when it became clear that Mr. Webb was close to securing enough Republican votes to win.

And it was dealt a death blow when Senator John W. Warner, Mr. Webb’s fellow Virginian, and one of the most respected Republican voices on military affairs, announced dramatically on the Senate floor that he was withdrawing his support for the proposal based on information provided by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and other senior military officials.

“I endorsed it,” Mr. Warner said of Mr. Webb’s plan. “I intend now to cast a vote against it.”

In explaining his decision, Mr. Warner said he had been convinced, at a meeting earlier in the day with senior military officials, that the Webb plan would cause havoc for the armed forces, potentially lengthening tours in Iraq. He also met with Mr. Gates, a longtime friend, on Monday.

But Mr. Warner’s change in position echoed a wider unwillingness by Republicans to break ranks with the administration.

The two Republican senators running for president — John McCain of Arizona and Sam Brownback of Kansas — voted against the Webb proposal. Four Democratic candidates — Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Barack Obama of Illinois, Mr. Biden and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut — voted for it.

The continuing partisan divide frustrated some moderate lawmakers in each party who are eager to help shape Iraq policy and signal to constituents that they are working to end the war.

Mr. Reid traveled on Monday to New York City to help raise money for antiwar groups, and while Democrats remain under substantial pressure from those groups, Mr. Manley and others said that event was scheduled weeks ago and had no bearing on the legislative change of tack.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who worked to defeat the Webb plan, said the Republican support for the war could have a political cost. “The Republicans own this war,” he said. “If it goes bad, the nation loses and the Republican Party loses disproportionately compared to the Democratic Party.”

Originally Published by the NYTimes