Andanh.com

We are barely at the beginning of the long period in which most Americans will give their first serious scrutiny to the presidential candidates and decide whether Barack Obama or John McCain will get their vote.

McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes. His shifts in position that have occurred in this campaign seem not to have damaged that aura.

Obama is much newer to most voters, less familiar and more dependent on the impressions he is only now creating. That is why a pair of strategy decisions made in the past two weeks could prove troublesome for him.

The first was Obama's turning down McCain's invitation to join him in a series of town hall meetings, where they would appear together and answer questions from real voters.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe initially called the idea "appealing." But nine days later, when he got around to responding, Plouffe countered with something quite different from the 10 informal discussions McCain proposed holding before the late-summer nominating conventions. Plouffe said that in addition to the three traditional debates under official sponsorship later in the fall, there could be only two others -- one on economics on July 4 and another on foreign policy in August.

"I'd just like to add that I really hate this. Thank you."

-- Wichita City Council member Jim Skelton, before voting to loan $6 million to the Old Town Warren Theatre

"Thanks be to God and the GAO."

-- Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., on the report accusing the Air Force of erring in awarding the tanker contract to EADS/Northrop Grumman

"Change we can believe in."

Who was the tall young man, the quiet guy with the small wire-rimmed glasses, who was spending the entire day, every day, with the badly wounded soldier in Room 5711 at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center?

The doctors, the nurses, the technicians and assorted attendants all wanted to know. The man was always very quiet and polite and quick to help out however he could. Who was he?

Joshua Hubbell and Luis Rosa-Valentin were best friends at Meade Senior High School at Fort Meade, Md., just outside of Washington, D.C. Josh graduated in 2000 and Luis in 2001. Both of their dads were career soldiers.

"We'd go straight from school to his house to play video games," Josh told me last weekend.

A few years ago, Josh, who is 26, learned he had testicular cancer. "At that young age, you think you're invincible," he said. "The toll that it took mentally was just devastating."

After Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton recently met for a private tete-a-tete, speculation mushroomed as to what Obama might be offering his former rival. Pundits cited all the possibilities: the vice presidency, a spot in the Cabinet, Senate majority leader and -- yes -- appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Is it possible that Obama might adopt Dwight Eisenhower's 1952 strategy for dealing with a contentious political rival? California Gov. Earl Warren had run for president three times and saw himself in line for the Republican presidential nomination in '52, but the war hero of Europe came home and derailed his plans.

Myths abound concerning the Eisenhower-Warren relationship, including the erroneous story that Ike used an appointment to the court to repay Warren for support at the Republican convention, where he didn't have a majority of delegates secured. In fact, Warren didn't release his delegates until after the contest was over.

But after his election in November, Eisenhower strode into Herbert Brownell's room at the Commodore Hotel in New York City, where the future attorney general was working on Cabinet appointments. According to Brownell, Ike announced, "I want Gov. Warren to know that we consider him a part of the Eisenhower team." Did he want Warren in the Cabinet? No, said the president-elect, "I think he'd be a good man on the Supreme Court."

Eisenhower placed the call himself. "Governor," Warren recalled Eisenhower saying, "I want you to know that I intend to offer you the first vacancy on the Supreme Court." Eisenhower confirmed the call in his memoirs but claimed that he was only "considering the possibility." But the proof of this secret deal lies in the fact that when Chief Justice Fred Vinson died the following September, Eisenhower nominated Warren for the job.

At the end of a long presentation outlining new services, new doctors, new facilities and a growth in income this year at a rate greater than the growth of the economy, the unusually savvy and successful senior vice president and chief medical officer of Stormont-Vail HealthCare, Kent Palmberg, sighed and quietly said, "I'm not sure where all this is going, but we'll probably end up with something like Medicare for all."

He added, "I'm not sure that's all bad. They pay promptly, predictably and adequately, with a minimum of paperwork. That beats costly fighting with scores of insurance companies, plus caring for the many uninsured."

Palmberg's audience was about 35 retired physicians, men and women who had provided good medical care for Kansans over some or all of the past 50 years, and who participated in the unprecedented growth of our profession. I watched closely. None flinched, none shook his head or raised her hand to register an objection.

Their probable attitudes coincide with a 2007 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that found 59 percent of physicians in the United States support "government legislation to establish national health insurance," up 10 percent in five years.

Palmberg, who oversees the nearly 170 physicians who provide care at 23 locations in northeast Kansas, was also affirming the December 2007 endorsement by the American College of Physicians, medicine's largest specialty society, of a single-payer national health system as "one pathway" to universal coverage.