US will review death of student - Boston Globe

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Hours after a New York State grand jury declined yesterday to indict any of the police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Pace University student Danroy “D.J.’’ Henry Jr., of Easton, the US Department of Justice announced plans to examine the case.

“Consistent with our practice in cases of this kind, the Department of Justice will review all of the available evidence with respect to the death of Danroy Henry Jr., including the evidence available to the Westchester County district attorney’s office, to determine whether there were any violations of the federal criminal civil rights laws,’’ said Ellen Davis, a spokeswoman for the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.

Federal officials had been urged to review the case by Henry’s family, and Senator Scott Brown has called for a thorough investigation. The Justice Department, which had been monitoring the case, was awaiting the results of the state and local investigation before beginning its own.

Davis’s announcement followed a statement from Janet DiFiore, the Westchester, N.Y., district attorney, in which she said that after “due deliberation on the evidence presented in this matter, the grand jury found that there was no reasonable cause to vote an indictment.’’

The finding of “no true bill’’ indicates that the grand jury found no criminal wrongdoing by police who fatally shot Henry during the early morning hours of Oct. 17 outside a bar at a shopping center in Mount Pleasant, about 30 miles north of New York City.

The decision angered Henry’s family, whose members are pursuing a $120 million lawsuit against the Town of Mount Pleasant and Village of Pleasantville, N.Y.

“There are no words to express our disappointment in the grand jury’s decision,’’ Henry’s father, Danroy Henry Sr., said in a statement yesterday.

“Conclusions appear to have been drawn at the outset,’’ he said, “and the entire process appears now to have been nothing short of an attempt to create better optics for the DA and her office.’’

The district attorney said the grand jury, which began hearing testimony Jan. 10, had made “an exhaustive and thorough review of the evidence’’ that included appearances by 85 witnesses and more than 100 exhibits.

The Henry family members and their New York civil rights lawyer, Michael Sussman, have long questioned why local police were allowed to investigate a shooting by one of their own officers. The case has been investigated by New York State Police and local officers, along with the district attorney.

A lawyer for Pleasantville Officer Aaron Hess, who has acknowledged shooting at Henry, said that Henry was responsible for his own death and that Hess and his family were grateful for the grand jury’s decision.

“The loss of life that occurred that morning is regrettable and tragic, but any reasonable view of the evidence as to what took place that night demands recognition of the fact that Aaron Hess acted properly and D.J. Henry did not,’’ John K. Grant, Hess’s lawyer, said. “Sometimes the truth is painful, and in this case the painful truth is that D.J. Henry brought about his own death. Lost has been the fact that Aaron Hess too is a good and decent human being, who went to work that night to help keep his community safe.’’

Before that statement was issued, the elder Henry said: “This process is most analogous to a person committing a crime which their siblings investigate and for which their closest relatives determine their punishment. All the while the crime victim is left in the dark until the family decides how [to] handle the misdeed of their own.’’

During a fiery conference call with reporters shortly after the decision, Sussman also questioned the impartiality of the local district attorney, who works closely with local police.

Sussman said that the grand jury process is heavily weighted toward the prosecution and that indictments would have come down if prosecutors were truly seeking them.

“A district attorney can indict a ham sandwich,’’ Sussman said, quoting a 1985 New York appellate court judge’s comments on the grand jury process.

Speaking of police and prosecutors, he declared: “To say they rely on each other is to say that the fetus relies upon the mother.’’

Sussman called the shooting “an orgy of violence directed toward students.’’

Police responded to the bar where many students had gathered after the homecoming game between Pace and Stonehill College. Henry, 20, a junior, was shot after he hit two officers with his car after refusing to stop, police allege.

Conflicting reports have surfaced from witnesses, who have said Henry was trying to move his car at the request of a police officer. A police officer mounted the hood and fired repeatedly through the front windshield, killing Henry.

The elder Henry also accused prosecutors of softballing the grand jury, not aggressively pursuing an indictment against the officers who shot his son, who played on the Pace football team.

“We firmly believe that we have a good handle on what happened,’’ he said. “We never believed for a second that this district attorney was pursuing an indictment, so we already contemplated going around her, which is why we’re going to the Justice Department.’’

The officers involved in the shooting have taken criticism from police specialists, who have said that there is no training module in policing that involves jumping on a moving car and firing at the driver. In a notice of claim filed with both communities in December, Sussman alleged that police were improperly trained and unqualified to serve as armed officers.

While Sussman said he was confident the whole story will come out during the coming civil lawsuit, he said yesterday’s ruling was a reminder of racial inequity in the criminal justice system. Henry was black, and the officers who shot him are white.

“We have no lack of confidence in our ability, but the criminal justice system is supposed to be here for every American, and today is a sign that it’s not, regardless of who’s president of the United States,’’ Sussman said.

“To me, it sends a clear message to every parent of color who has a child away at college that they better be darn worried if something happens to them.’’

Bonita E. Zelman, a New York civil rights attorney lawyer representing five other Pace students, also criticized yesterday’s finding. “No citizen should accept a murder committed by anyone, certainly not a murder committed by a person sworn to protect the public good,’’ Henry’s father said.

Martin Finucane of the Globe staff contributed to this report. John M. Guilfoil can be reached at jguilfoil@globe.com.

© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Obama=Bush? - Boston Globe

var archivedState=0; (Globe Staff photo illustration )

Months before Election Day, the name of Jimmy Carter had assumed an incantatory power among observers of politics. President Obama’s supporters began to fret that his presidency was declining as Carter’s did, while his opponents salivated at the prospect, as though the more the 39th president was mentioned, the worse the chances of the 44th. In addition to columnists and bloggers, historians Walter Russell Mead and Sean Wilentz have written on the comparison, while Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, has worried over it. Carter himself recently discussed it with Larry King.

Is Obama the next Carter? Leaving aside for the moment the facility and myopia of this analogy — we’ve had 17 one-term presidents — its details are off. Obama and Carter are both Democrats, true, both are intellectuals who came into office on a wave of discontent, and both promised new approaches to government and the world. What candidates don’t? Obama seems to like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even less than Carter liked Menachim Begin, and Carter faced a crisis in Iran, a new eruption of terrorist threats, and economic woes, though all of very different sorts than those facing Obama.

But where Carter, a notorious micromanager and hand-wringer, appeared to bog down in the carpet fibers of the presidency, a common complaint about Obama is that he’s in the clouds. Where Carter was said to have a morose and pedantic outlook, Obama is accused of being, rather, cerebral and aloof — related charges, maybe, but not the same. Recounting Carter’s fumbling Mideast statecraft in his book “A World of Trouble,” Patrick Tyler described an “obsessive technocrat who wore his idealism like a crucifix and his pragmatism like a slide rule clipped to his waistband.” That’s not Obama.

Yet there is a recent one-term president he resembles. George H.W. Bush doesn’t often come up in discussions of Obama, but two years into Obama’s term, the two presidents’ tenures bear a striking resemblance. So too do their governing styles and temperaments, and even, unlikely though it may seem, their speech. Here are two leaders “buffeted by circumstance,” as the presidential historian Bert Rockman characterized Bush, whose same signal qualities in repulsing buffets and discussing them with the public — sobriety, patience, and, yes, prudence, to use Bush-impersonator Dana Carvey’s favorite Bushism — are often enough their least appreciated.

But why attempt the comparison at

all? Isn’t analyzing the doings of one White House frustrating enough? Were we able to travel back in time and stand behind each of the 44 presidents as they went about a day in office, we’d no doubt find the diversity of problems they faced and the ways they faced them makes drawing parallels laughable. Despite working in the Oval Office, each successive occupant of it is a nonpareil.

Still, the practice feels necessary. Why? Most simply, because comparison is how we learn, how we judge. Comparing Obama to Carter, even if it’s to express disfavor, is a way of fitting him into a group, of trying to understand him and the challenges of his job. It’s a way of familiarizing him. That Obama is the first African-American president makes this impulse all the stronger. Similarly, while presidents have been compared since John Adams succeeded George Washington, when we’re talking about a young president with scant public record prior to his election, past presidential performances are one of the few available yardsticks.

So let’s compare, first, those historical buffets. In the first year of Bush’s term, he was beset by three unforeseen calamities that are eerily resonant. First was the savings & loan crisis. Facilitated by deregulation and a mortgage bubble, the S&L crisis threatened the country’s banking system by the time of Bush’s inaugural. Unpopular though he knew the move would be, Bush and Congress put together a massive tax-funded rescue. The public didn’t understand the disastrous alternative scenario, and the move was assailed as a bailout of reckless bankers.

Then, in the spring of 1989, student-led protestors began assembling in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and in June Chinese police and soldiers took to beating and murdering them. Like Obama, Bush came into office with higher than average respect from foreign leaders, but he had to shelve plans to improve American-Chinese relations, a blow to his larger ambitions to redefine American engagement with the Communist world. He cut off diplomatic ties to China after Tiananmen, but, a committed internationalist, he believed engagement was eventually the right strategy. He was roundly criticized for not doing enough to support the protestors.

That didn’t turn as many people against him as what was, until this year, the worst man-made natural disaster in American history. In March of 1989 the Exxon Valdez spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound. Since “everybody now expects the man inside the White House to do something about everything,” as the presidential historian Richard Neustadt observed in his study “Presidential Power,” Bush, a former oilman, bore only somewhat less blame than Exxon.

Jump to 2009-10: The Troubled Asset Relief Program and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as the stimulus, are seen by many Americans as bailouts, not legitimate attempts to stave off economic catastrophe. (TARP was created by the George W. Bush administration, but according to recent polls two-thirds of Americans attribute it to Obama.) Obama, who has arrived in office with the hopes of foreign leaders and populations riding high, wants to redefine relations with, most of all, the Muslim world, but before he has the chance there are protests, and then violent crackdowns, in Tehran. (Unlike the crisis Carter faced in 1979, this was not a revolution, and the Iranian government was in no danger of crumbling.) He is criticized for not expressing enough support for the protestors, criticism that pales in comparison to that of his handling of the BP oil spill.

George H. W. Bush came into office facing what many economists called the worst economic downturn since the Depression, accompanied by a collapse in the real estate market and a Wall Street racked by scandal and stock market decline. He succeeded a president, Ronald Reagan, who staked his reputation on limited government while expanding it in certain costly areas, particularly the military, leaving record deficits. Though Bush would have liked to do more in domestic policy, he was constrained not just by money, but by a widespread public conviction, inflamed by Reagan, that government “is the problem.” Bush pollster Robert Teeter recognized this early on, seeing that while Americans were revolted by the “private interest” excesses of the Reagan era — as Bush himself was — they were also unwilling to embrace the “public purpose” alternative.

Twenty years later, Obama followed on the heels of a self-proclaimed Reagan Republican whose tenure ended in straits like those Reagan’s had. And Obama faced the same conundrum: He campaigned on the promise of a renewed sense of public purpose, and perhaps the most fundamental misreading of the public he made was thinking that what even many conservatives wanted, after George W. Bush, was not smaller government but rather more competent big government. Long before they’d occurred, the 2010 elections were deemed a rejection of that notion.

It’s little remembered now that a renewed sense of public purpose was also Bush’s hope. We recall with amused pity the phrases “a thousand points of light” and “a kinder, gentler America,” but those ideas meant something to Bush. He’d studied at the feet of the policy mandarins who surrounded his father, Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush, conservative men who nonetheless believed in the ability of government to improve people’s lives, a proposition Reagan made his name maligning. Though he first ran as a Goldwater conservative, as a young congressman — like Obama but unlike Carter, Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W., he came out of the Legislature — Bush proved his mettle by bravely voting for Lyndon Johnson’s fair housing bill, after Johnson had announced he wasn’t seeking reelection, and over the objections of Bush’s incensed white Houston constituents.

In 1988, Bush could not run openly on reversing his predecessor’s policies, as Obama would later run against his son, but he did so tacitly. He was troubled by the rampant deregulation and decline in social services funding of the 1980s. Indeed, one slogan of his campaign, since forgotten, was “We Are The Change!” (add “we seek” to the end of that, and you have an oft-repeated slogan of the Obama campaign).

As president, Bush signed into law the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. He put the full weight of the White House behind renewing the Clean Air and Water Acts (a coup Obama would be lucky to equal). He effected the first minimum wage increase in a decade. Most gallingly for his friends on Wall Street, in the wake of the S&L crisis he approved the most significant package of financial regulation reforms until 2010’s Consumer Financial Protection Act.

In his inaugural address, in which he studiously eschewed the folksy populism of Carter, Obama pledged that Americans were “ready to lead once more.” Similarly Bush predicted a “new world order” led by America, a phrase that would come to haunt him in the 1992 primaries. “Is George Bush merely an idealist or are there now plans underway to merge the interests of the US and the Soviet Union in the United Nations,” Pat Robertson drooled in his campaign book, “and install a socialist ‘world order’ in place of a free market system?” If that rings a bell, it may be because you’ve been watching clips of Glenn Beck.

There is also a rhetorical similarity between the two presidents. Obama is better spoken and more inspiring than was Bush, but, like Obama, Bush’s central rhetorical fault — how he eventually lost the public — was that he was always cool, always rational. He knew what he wanted, and what he’d done, but, like Obama, he was almost bashful about explaining as much to Americans, going so far as to cross many of the I’s out of his addresses. Bush press secretary Marlin Fitzwater lamented that his boss’s approach to message politics was “If I am doing the right thing, I can take any punishment.” Bush himself admitted, “I’m not good at expressing the concerns of a nation — I’m just not very good at it.”

Like Obama, Bush had a cerebral, deliberative, occasionally paradoxical way of speaking. In a fascinating study, “Personality Profiles of the 1992 Presidential Candidates as Derived from their Speech Patterns,” a pair of speech pathologists found that Bush’s most hobbling tendency as a speaker was not his well-known gaffes, which many people actually found endearing, but his Obama-esque fondness for retractors — “but,” “however,” “nevertheless,” and other such words that suggest active thought but also reversals of course.

The presidential historian Richard Hofstadter, who perfected the art of comparing chief executives, pointed out that the activity was a cultural necessity. “A longing to recapture the past, in fact, has itself been such a basic ingredient of the recent American past that no history of political thinking is complete which does not attempt to explain it,” Hofstadter wrote in “The American Political Tradition.” In other words, as Americans, we ply a kind of hyper-nostalgia. Hence every officeholder runs on the promise of restoring tradition, acknowledging as little as possible that America has many governmental traditions, not just one, a fact writ large in the presidency. It is said that nothing can prepare a candidate for the highest office. Maybe then we must compare presidents precisely because they are nonpareils? The presidency is an embodiment of so many traditions, a job of such power, of such complexity and thanklessness, there is no standard of measurement for it except itself.

This winter, Obama will face what promises to be a bitter debate over the deficit and taxes. Commentators will no doubt compare it to the budget battle of 1995-96, when Washington shut down. A better parallel, however, would be the fiscal debate Bush faced in 1990. More than anything, it proved the undoing of his presidency. Bush wrote in his diary at the time that he knew a decision to raise taxes might cost him reelection. He also knew that the cavalier spirit behind his “read my lips!” campaign pledge, while popular, was unwise — which is to say unlike George H.W. Bush. So he agreed to raise taxes.

Never mind that the deficit reduction bill he signed paved the way for the surpluses of the 1990s, or that his tax increase was actually smaller than an earlier one forced upon Reagan in percentage of gross domestic product: Republican legislators abandoned Bush over the decision. Their treacherous logic was voiced by Minnesota Congressman Vin Weber: “What is good for the president may well be good for the country, but it is not necessarily good for congressional Republicans. We need wedge issues to beat incumbent Democrats.”

If that sentiment sounds familiar, it’s because you encountered it a few weeks ago — but not from Republicans. It summed up the playbook of Democrats running for their lives, away from Obama’s policies. It resulted in the loss of the House of Representatives.

James Verini is a journalist in New York. You can read his work at http://www.jamesverini.com/.

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Transit Police investigate death of BU grad, 22, struck by trolley - Boston Globe

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A 22-year-old Boston University graduate was struck and killed by an MBTA Green Line train headed eastbound shortly after midnight yesterday between the Longwood and Fenway stops.

The man, identified as Joshua Stimson of Brighton, was found on the eastbound tracks and pronounced dead at the scene, according to an MBTA spokesman, Joe Pesaturo.

It remains unclear why Stimson was inside the fence-enclosed Green Line right-of-way, where his body was found west of the Fenway stop, but Pesaturo said early investigation suggests alcohol may have been a factor. Problems with the train or signal on the Riverside line have been ruled out and the trolley driver received no citations or disciplinary actions.

Laurel Bennis, a friend, said Stimson had had dinner in her apartment near Kenmore Square Saturday and was making plans for the night when he left around 8 p.m.

“We’re still trying to piece it together, seeing who he was with,’’ Bennis said. “It’s kind of a big shock. It’s a mystery to all of us.’’

Friends described Stimson as fun-loving, smart, and an all-around good friend with a great sense of humor. He had been one of the top five racers on the Boston University ski team and did mixed martial arts to stay in shape.

“He was one of the greatest friends I’ve ever had,’’ said Bennis, who shared an apartment with Stimson last summer. “He always knew how to cheer you up, always knew how to get you out of a funk you were in.’’

Stimson graduated this spring from Boston University’s School of Management, where he studied finance, Bennis said. He had started a job last Monday at a global management company specializing in consulting, technology, and outsourcing, she said. He was very excited about it and really liked his co-workers, Bennis said.

Ben Elliott, who said he had known Stimson for “longer than I can remember,’’ grew up with him in North Haverhill, N.H., where they went to Woodsville High School. Elliott said he would always tell Stimson he was “too smart for his own good.’’

Elliott said he had just spoken to Stimson on Saturday and heard about Stimson’s death early yesterday from friends. Elliott said he was a Marine and had never shed a tear during his active duty, but, “This morning, hearing about Josh, I cried.’’

A Boston University spokesman, Colin Riley, said the university had been notified of the death. “It’s an extremely sad situation,’’ he said.

MBTA Transit Police were notified at 12:19 a.m. and Brookline police and fire departments, along with emergency medical services, responded. The death remains under investigation by the MBTA Transit Police.

Taylor M. Miles can be reached at tmiles@globe.com.

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Some key Tea Party races - Boston Globe

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The Tea Party movement has been a defining force in 2010. With its aim zeroed in at the power structure of Washington, this political whirlwind has energized some Republicans and independents and left others shuddering. Some GOP leaders have feared that the movement’s candidates — most have never held high elective office — would cost the party a chance at grabbing control of the Senate. With the exception of Christine O’Donnell’s campaign spectacularly crashing, costing the GOP dearly in Delaware, Tea Party-backed Republicans are either running ahead of Democrats or about even. In Republican-dominant Utah, Mike Lee is expected to easily win. Marco Rubio, one of the first candidates to tap into Tea Party fervor, is cruising in Florida. Here’s a look at six other Tea Party-backed candidates in six races that will keep political junkies on the edge of their seats Tuesday night.

?Grew up in a household of avid Democrats in East Providence, R.I., and graduated from Harvard.

?Business career includes stints as an international currency analyst and co-founder of a string of sports bars.

?Was three-term US representative before becoming president of Club for Growth, which supports fiscally conservative politicians.

Campaign: With his longstanding attacks on business-as-usual in Washington and his fervent push for fiscal conservatism, Toomey had been a Tea Party-type politician before there was a Tea Party. His decision to challenge longtime GOP Senator Arlen Specter sparked a series of decisions that altered the political landscape in Washington. Specter, who barely beat Toomey in 2004, decided he could not win a rematch and switched parties, giving the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority until the election of Scott Brown of Massachusetts. Despite White House backing, Specter still lost the primary to Joe Sestak. Toomey backs replacing the income tax system with either a flat tax or consumption tax and calls for a constitutional amendment to require a balanced federal budget. The success of his campaign depends on the heartland of Pennsylvania, a state that Democratic consultant James Carville once characterized as (liberal) Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between.

Prospects: Although his numbers have been slipping, Toomey still has a lead of 4 percentage points.*

?Son of US Representative Ron Paul of Texas, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate whose libertarian backers formed a cornerstone of the Tea Party movement.

?Has practiced ophthalmology for 17 years.

?Running for seat of retiring Republican Jim Bunning.

Campaign: “I have a message, a message from the Tea Party, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We have come to take our government back,’’ Paul said in May after he became the first candidate backed by the movement to win a primary. He did so resoundingly, crushing the establishment candidate endorsed by his potential Senate stablemate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It did not take long, however, for libertarian views to land Paul in hot water. He suggested that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should not apply to businesses and questioned whether the federal government should have a role in food or worker safety, prompting a storm of attacks. Yet his tough talk on the need to cut government programs and stiffen eligibility for entitlement benefits has attracted a strong following. The race has turned particularly ugly, with ads by Democratic nominee Jack Conway characterizing sophomoric pranks Paul allegedly did in college as anti-Christian and potentially criminal, a ploy even some Democrats say is desperate. Also, a video of Paul supporters pinning a protester to the ground and stepping on her head has inflamed emotions on both sides.

Prospects: He has maintained a rather sizable lead throughout the fall and is now up by almost 9 percentage points.

?Started an Oshkosh company that makes plastic packaging material.

?A political neophyte, he became drawn to the race after speaking at a Tea Party rally.

?Has pumped $4.4 million of his own money into the campaign.

Campaign: Johnson was catapulted to a primary win when the establishment candidate unexpectedly dropped out and supported him. He started as an underdog against incumbent Russ Feingold, but by pitching himself as an outsider and Feingold as a big-spending, out-of-touch insider, he has become the late favorite. He also has combined a well-regarded quirky ad campaign touting “the Johnson Way” with such provocative quotes as “I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change’’ and calling the health care overhaul the ”greatest assault on our freedom in my lifetime.’’

Prospects: Johnson maintains a lead of about 5 percentage points.

?Earned All-Ivy League honors as a punter on the Princeton football team.

?Served as a lawyer and investigator for Dick Cheney, then a US representative, during the Iran-contra hearings and worked as a prosecutor for the Justice Department.

?Served 14 years in the US attorney’s office before becoming district attorney for a county north of Denver.

Campaign: His upset win over the GOP establishment candidate put him against Democrat Michael Bennet, who was appointed to replace Ken Salazar when Salazar was named US interior secretary. In this ideologically splintered state, Buck has generally avoided moderating his positions to attract independents. He opposes abortion except to protect the life of the mother and suggests ending Social Security benefits for well-off Americans. He also calls for overturning the new health care law and opposes cap/trade legislation, while backing nuclear energy.

Prospects: Buck’s lead in the polls has been dwindling -- down to less than 1 percentage point.

?Co-founded a K-12 Christian school.

?A grandmother of 10 and a weightlifting aficionado known to carry a .44 Magnum handgun.

?Earned a reputation in the Nevada legislature for opposing nearly all bills, with votes of widely popular legislation becoming known as 41-to-Angle. Led fight in state and federal courts to preserve state rule requiring two-thirds legislative vote to pass tax increases.

Campaign: In an upset, she won the primary over the establishment candidate for the chance to grab one of the top trophies of this election for the GOP: the seat of majority leader Harry Reid. Her campaign, however, has suffered through several misfires of intemperate remarks, awkward run-ins with media and voters, and backpedaling from hard-line views, such as privatizing Social Security and Medicare and eliminating the EPA and departments of education and energy. She has, however, been able to raise a staggering amount of money -- $14 million in last quarter -- and her strident pitch against the Beltway mentality has resonated with Nevadans in one of the states hardest hit by the housing downtown. Reid, on the other hand, has struggled to spark much enthusiasm among independents.

Prospects: After swapping leads with Reid in the polls for much of the late summer, Angle has seemed to regain her footing, up by 3 percentage points. Fans of politics might need plenty of coffee for this one: Returns will probably be coming in through the early morning.

?A West Point graduate, he earned the Bronze Star in the Gulf War.

?A Yale Law graduate, he served as a state judge and federal judge.

?Lost his first attempt for elective office, for state representative in 2004.

Campaign: Propelled by support from fellow Alaskan Sarah Palin, Miller won a stunning upset in primary, edging out GOP incumbent Lisa Murkowski, a body blow to national Republican leaders. That was only Act I in this political drama. Murkowski has bounced back with a write-in campaign that features fliers picturing skis to guide voters on how to spell her name, and Democrat Scott McAdams is showing life in a state where his party had been on the edge of extinction for years. Miller vows to drastically cut the size of government, but the only thing shrinking now is his lead. His campaign has been freighted by controversy recently, with charges that his family had received various federal benefits despite his criticism of such programs. With questions swirling on how to verify Murkowski’s write-in votes and with potential challenges to thousands of ballots expected, campaign watchers say Alaskans could be in for an extended and contentious tallying of ballots.

Prospects: It’s a tossup between Miller and Murkowski, with McAdams about 10 percentage points behind.

*All poll results are from an averaging of recent surveys by political website, fivethirtyeight blog.

SOURCES: New York Times, Washington Post, campaign websites

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Obama returns to home turf to rally party spirits - Boston Globe

var archivedState=0;Campaign 2010 | HEADLONG DASH TO FINISH

CHICAGO — President Obama embarked on a last-ditch campaign marathon yesterday in a bid to blunt the political rebuke expected to be delivered by voters in Tuesday’s midterm elections, urging dispirited Americans to give Democrats more time to deliver on the promise of change the president made two years ago.

“For those of you who were so excited two years ago, I just want to remind you this: Two years ago was not about me,’’ the president said to volunteers at a get-out-the-vote canvassing event in Philadelphia yesterday morning. “It was about you and it was about this country. And I said then that change was going to be hard . . . We can’t move backwards now. We’ve got to keep moving forward.’’

Democrats are hoping they can avoid the widely forecasted anti-incumbent wave that could overturn the party’s majority in the US House and seriously erode its advantage in the Senate.

But Obama’s choice of locations to deliver his closing argument was telling: He made stops in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, places where he enjoyed broad support in 2008, before wrapping up last night in Illinois, where his party is struggling to prevent his former Senate seat from falling into the hands of Republicans. Obama was scheduled to visit Cleveland today.

The Illinois Senate race, between Democrat Alexi Giannoulias and Republican Mark Kirk, is at best a toss-up for Democrats, who need a strong turnout among their base to prevent the GOP from snatching a highly symbolic victory in Obama’s backyard.

In Pennsylvania, Democrat Joe Sestak and Republican Pat Toomey are in a close Senate race, though most pollsters give Toomey the edge. The Connecticut Senate race is faring better for Democrats; polls show Richard Blumenthal leading Republican Linda McMahon.

Obama supporters who are sticking with the president and backing Democrats this fall foresee difficult times ahead for the party after Tuesday’s vote.

“Absolutely — I’m worried,’’ said Jarrod Ayme, 23, of Chicago, who works for a nonprofit agency. “I’m worried that [the Democrats’] power is going to dwindle considerably.’’

The president last night revved up Democrats at a rally just a few blocks from Lake Michigan and a few miles from Grant Park, where two years ago he celebrated an overwhelming Democratic victory with 240,000 ecstatic supporters.

The euphoria of that 2008 night has faded, as the nation’s slow economic recovery has undermined the president’s campaign themes of hope and change, and hurt his popularity. He also has come under fire in some quarters for pushing through a health care insurance overhaul that Republicans are promising to roll back if they seize power.

“I was gone overseas for the first six months of his presidency, and when I got back the perception of him seemed to have totally changed. . . . So many people were pessimistic,’’ said Matti Scannell, 19, of Chicago, who traveled to Spain in 2009.

Democrats are fighting to hold onto threatened Senate seats in California, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Colorado, Washington, and West Virginia. In Nevada, the majority leader of the US Senate, Harry Reid, is fighting to save his career against Republican Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle. Democratic seats in North Dakota, Arkansas, and Indiana have already been all but written off as lost.

The Republican House minority leader, John Boehner, who would likely become speaker if his party takes a US House majority on Tuesday, said yesterday that Republicans stand ready to bring more transparency to government and cut federal spending if voters entrust them with the reins of power. “We’ve tried it President Obama’s way,’’ said Boehner, in the weekly Republican address. “We’ve tried it Washington’s way. It hasn’t worked. It’s time to put the people back in charge.’’

Obama has been trying for weeks to build a firewall against Democratic losses by rallying supporters in states with close races, a strategy that led him back to his hometown.

The contest between Giannoulias, the state treasurer, and Kirk, a five-term congressman from the northern Chicago suburbs, is one of the closest Senate races in the country. Most of the polls suggest the race is a statistical tie, within the typical margin of error for opinion surveys.

The tight race “is a good metaphor for what’s going on nationally,’’ said Kent Redfield, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield. “You’ve got the president trying to bring the Democratic base — women, African-Americans, Hispanics — back to their candidates, trying to generate enthusiasm in a state the Democrats have dominated.’’

The seat Obama gave up when he won the presidency is open this fall; Roland Burris, who was appointed by then-governor Rod Blagojevich to serve out Obama’s unfinished term, declined to run again.

The campaign to replace Burris is between two men who are considered rising stars of their parties.

Giannoulias, (pronounced jeh-NOO-lee-us) a Boston University graduate, entered politics four years ago after helping manage Broadway Bank, a Chicago community lender founded by his father. In 2006, with support from then-senator Obama, Giannoulias, then just 30, became the nation’s youngest state treasurer.

But the private banking experience that was so helpful in his last race has been a liability this year. Broadway Bank failed in April and was taken over by the FDIC. And Giannoulias has been dogged by revelations that Broadway loaned $20 million to two Chicago felons, sometimes more colorfully described as “mob figures’’ in the local media, while Giannoulias was a senior loan officer.

Those embarrassments might have crushed Giannoulias’ campaign months ago if Kirk hadn’t evened the playing field by exaggerating his résumé.

Kirk, 51, apologized in the spring for making false statements about his 21-year Navy Reserve career, including the untrue claim that he had served in the Gulf War. He speaks contritely about learning “a painful lesson’’ from the episode, though he has resisted explaining why he overstated his record. He is the type of centrist Republican that typically has the best chance of winning in Democratic-leaning Illinois, specialists said.

“Mark Kirk is not a hyper-partisan,’’ said Gabe Rubin, 18, of Skokie, who stood for hours in an eye-watering cold wind demonstrating for the Kirk campaign outside a debate last week. “I want someone who votes what he believes is best for his constituents, not what his party tells him to vote.’’

Kirk’s campaign office did not respond to several messages for an interview.

Throughout the hard-fought campaign, the candidates have eagerly exploited each other’s missteps.

“All the campaign ads begin with smears,’’ said John Brehm, a University of Chicago political science professor. “It’s been pretty dirty. Though perhaps I shouldn’t use the word ‘dirty,’ because what they’re saying about each other is true.’’

The tone of the race has been so relentlessly negative that Giannoulias surprised campaign watchers last week by promising to run only positive ads in the final days. His prohibition on attacks did not extend to debates — the two candidates exchanged unpleasantries in person last Wednesday in their final televised forum.

On Friday, Giannoulias and his mother canvassed on the busy streets of Boystown, a Chicago district with a large gay population. A jovial Giannoulias said his campaign’s field operation was ready. “Turnout in this city is going to be through the roof,’’ he predicted.

He will need a large turnout from the city’s Democratic base to win, and to save the president from an embarrassing rejection by the people who know him best.

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