New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called for a new poverty measure this week, and Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington held a hearing on his own proposal yesterday in the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, which he chairs.

But Obama’s support for the idea has the potential to advance the idea significantly, if he wins the election and pushes for it aggressively.

“Senator Obama knows that the federal poverty guidelines, which were developed decades ago, simply do not take into account the rising costs of child care, health care, transportation, and housing that make it difficult for many families to make ends meet in our globalizing economy,” campaign spokesman Nick Shapiro told me yesterday.

“Senator Obama believes that we should modernize the federal poverty guidelines to more accurately reflect the costs of living and the economic pressures on American families. Without an accurate measure of poverty and economic insecurity in America, we will not be able to fully tackle the effects of these problems on our children and families.”

John McCain hasn’t taken a position on the idea yet, campaign spokesman Taylor Griffin told me this morning.

The method of calculating the federal poverty line has been a back-burner issue for years among poverty experts because it hasn’t been updated since the 1960s. At that time, food cost a third of a typical family’s budget, which isn’t true anymore — it’s only about one seventh of a typical family’s costs now. At the same time, though, housing and work-related costs have become much more expensive than they were when the poverty guidelines were drawn up.

So the use of the outdated poverty measure, according to experts who testified at McDermott’s hearing yesterday, has had the paradoxical effect of underestimating a modern family’s expenses while also underestimating the amount of help they get from antipoverty programs like food stamps, housing assistance and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

The current measure “simply does not reflect this common sense understanding of what it means to be poor in 2008,” Douglas W. Nelson, president and chief executive officer of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, testified at yesterday’s hearing.

Instead, Bloomberg called for a new measurement, based on a 1995 proposal by the National Academy of Sciences, that would count the benefits of the antipoverty programs but also account for the growing costs of housing, transportation, utilities and out-of-pocket medical expenses. McDermott’s bill would require the Census Bureau to come up with a similar standard.

(Update: Bloomberg praised the Obama campaign’s announcement in a statement released Friday night. “Poverty is one of the great challenges of our day and I applaud Senator Obama’s campaign for standing up for a more honest way of measuring it,” Bloomberg said. “Without an accurate look at our nation’s problems, it is hopeless to expect to address them.”)

Changing the federal guidelines could, in theory, have a major impact on how many people are eligible for a wide range of programs that are tied to the poverty rate, from Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and food stamps. That’s probably the biggest reason the idea has never gotten off the ground. (McDermott says any eligibility changes wouldn’t be automatic in his bill; they’d be decided on a program-by-program basis.)

And even with a president’s support, there would be years of inertia to overcome. But now that it has Obama’s backing, the idea can’t be dismissed as just another academic pipe dream, either.

It was another way for John McCain’s surrogates to tweak Obama for not holding any hearings, on Afghanistan or anything else, in the Subcommittee on European Affairs that he has headed since last year. He has, of course, been running for president the whole time. DeMint, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, sent Obama a letter asking for a hearing and guest-starred in a McCain campaign conference call, telling reporters that “we have missed a lot opportunities to take more responsibility and to bring to public light the problems.”

So this morning, Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware — the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a potential Obama running mate — gently reminded DeMint that the full committee has, in fact, held hearings on Afghanistan, and argued that a full committee hearing trumps a subcommittee hearing anyway.

“As you are aware, under my Chairmanship the Foreign Relations Committee has addressed most Afghanistan issues at the Full Committee level,” Biden wrote to DeMint. “I believe that this is the best way of ensuring the most comprehensive examination of the complex issues involved, and of ensuring the highest-level Administration participation.”

Biden cited two hearings held during this Congress, one in March 2007 and the other in January 2008, as well as a September 2006 hearing held under then-chairman Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind.

So what did Obama do in those hearings? In March 2007, he asked retired Marine Gen. James Jones Jr., the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, what could be done to make the Pakistani military more aggressive in fighting the insurgency in Afghanistan. That was the only question he got in, thanks to time constraints on Jones’ schedule. (Jones gave a vague answer about the need to find “a way to scratch the itches on both sides of the border.”)

According to the transcripts of the other two hearings, Obama either wasn’t there or didn’t ask any questions.

Because Obama voted for it, and Dodd was, well, leading the charge against it.

Dodd and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin held up the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bill so the Senate couldn’t vote on it before the July Fourth recess, and he sponsored the amendment to strip out the immunity for the telecommunications companies.

“If we do not change course and stand for our Constitution at this hour, for what is best for our country, for what we know is just and right, then history, I am confident, will most certainly decide that it was those of us in this body who bear equal responsibility for the president’s decisions — for it was we who looked the other way, time and time again,” Dodd said in a floor speech.

It’s the kind of speech that tends to get quoted back at you if you’re the running mate of a senator who voted the other way.

By voting for the FISA bill, Obama may have considerably narrowed the field of senators whom he could comfortably pick as a running mate. After all, it’s not a minor issue. When the bill’s opponents quote the Constitution, and the nominee’s base is furious at him for supporting it, you can pretty much guarantee that people will ask how the presidential and vice presidential candidates would settle their differences.

It’s not just Dodd, who isn’t at the top of most VP speculation lists anyway. It’s also Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden, Jr. of Delaware, who is mentioned more seriously and also voted against the FISA bill. There’s also Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a West Point graduate and former Army paratrooper who is sometimes mentioned as a running mate who could boost Obama’s national security credentials. He opposed the bill, too.

And for anyone who’s still hoping Obama will team up with Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, her “no” vote probably will make that even more difficult than it was before. (She did say, in a statement, that “I respect my colleagues who reached a different conclusion on today’s vote.”)

That leaves Obama with Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Evan Bayh of Indiana, and Ken Salazar of Colorado, all VP prospects who supported the FISA bill. And if Jim Webb of Virginia ever reconsiders his decision to take himself out of the race, Obama could pick him, since he voted for the FISA bill, too.

Obama might not want a senator, of course, and a governor wouldn’t present these problems, since none of them got to vote on the bill. But it’s a safe bet that even the governors would be asked how they stand on the issue. And if they disagreed with Obama, they would be wise to talk about it in as non-threatening a way as possible.

This morning, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio announced that he’ll take 10 House Republicans (all of them freshmen) on an “American Energy Tour” next week. It will take them to, among other places, a part of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), where House Republicans would like to drill for oil.

They’ll have more of the public on their side than they did before, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, since $4-a-gallon gas is making people more receptive to expanding the search for energy resources. One person they won’t have on their side, however, is McCain. He has always opposed drilling in ANWR, and said last month that “When America set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, we called it a ‘refuge’ for a reason.”

Oops.

And yesterday, Obama returned to the Senate to vote for the compromise legislation rewriting the nation’s electronic surveillance law. He was one of 21 Democrats who voted for it — mostly centrists like Evan Bayh of Indiana, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and non-running-mate Jim Webb of Virginia.

So who were some of the 27 Democrats who voted against it? Let’s see: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Democratic Conference Vice Chairman Charles E. Schumer of New York, and Democratic Conference Secretary Patty Murray of Washington. In other words, pretty much the entire Democratic leadership.

Oops.

Both candidates have tried to paper over their differences with the Hill on these issues. McCain’s new-found support for offshore energy exploration has provided congressional Republicans with one energy proposal they can enthusiastically embrace, and both Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky have done so (McConnell gave a floor speech on the subject this morning).

And Obama, as promised, did vote for an amendment yesterday that would have knocked out the section of the surveillance legislation that would give immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program. The amendment failed miserably, as expected — it got only 32 votes. But at least the attempt put Obama, temporarily, in the company of the Senate Democratic leaders.

Still, both episodes prove that, as much as the presidential candidates and their congressional surrogates may sound like they’re parroting the same talking points, there will always be issues where they can’t or won’t get in sync. And there is only so much the campaigns’ ambassadors to Congress can do about it.

On a conference call with reporters, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, on the behalf of the John McCain campaign, jumped on a statement by Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, on behalf of the Obama campaign yesterday about Obama’s Iraq policy. In an interview on MSNBC, McCaskill was asked whether Obama would change his plan, given that an article in the New Yorker concluded that “his original plan, if implemented now, could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, reenergize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia’s recent losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse.”

McCaskill gave probably the only answer she could have given: “No, he will not.” (It’s usually frowned upon when surrogates announce major changes in policy.)

But on a conference call with reporters today, Cantor, said the exchange proved that Obama’s policy “ignores the facts on the ground” and accused him of “clinging to a very ideological commitment on his part, and, frankly, a commitment to some left-wing supporters that he won’t change his mind.”

Campaign spokesman Brian Rogers put it another way, referring to Obama’s reported plans to visit Iraq sometime this summer: “If indeed, you know, he’s going to go to Iraq, and nothing that he sees will change or impact his decision-making on this, then why is he going?”

It’s clear from the exchange how McCain is trying to box Obama in on Iraq. If Obama ever actually said he’ll change his withdrawal plans because Iraq is becoming more stable, well, what a flip-flopper. If he doesn’t, even if he learns new things when he visits Iraq, he’s a close-minded ideologue.

It’s still nothing compared to the dilemma McCain faces, as a staunch supporter of an unpopular war that will tie him to President Bush for the rest of the campaign. But the surrogate debate foreshadows a real problem Obama could face if he wins the presidency.

If, indeed, the reality of the Iraq war that greets him is different than the one he campaigned on, he could easily face the change or no-change dilemma all over again.

And then, the stakes would be greater than just winning or losing a campaign.

Hope you all have a happy Fourth! Back on Thursday, July 10.

McCain tried it this morning, in a speech to the National Sheriffs’ Association. The speech was full of pledges to help law enforcement in various ways, but McCain also touched on last week’s Supreme Court ruling that child rapists can’t get the death penalty. He called it a “jarring decision,” and gave Obama credit for criticizing it. But McCain also insisted that more of these kinds of rulings would be on the way if Obama got to nominate the next Supreme Court justices:

“Why is it that the majority includes the same justices he usually holds out as the models for future nominations? My opponent may not care for this particular decision, but it was exactly the kind of opinion we could expect from an Obama Court.

“Should I be elected president, I will look for accomplished men and women with a proven record of excellence in the law, and a proven commitment to judicial restraint. They will be the kind of judges who believe in giving everyone in a criminal court their due: justice for the guilty and the innocent, compassion for the victims, and respect for the men and women of law enforcement.”

It’s a clear sign that McCain thinks there are still plenty of socially conservative voters to be mobilized, Democratic year or not.

Obama’s supporters, meanwhile, are equally convinced they can head off any defections of women voters to McCain by reminding them that the next president can nominate justices who could actually tip the balance against Roe v. Wade. That was a big part of the discussion last week when Obama met with House Democratic women.

“They’d say, just make sure you talk about three words: the Supreme Court,” said Democratic Rep. Melissa Bean, one of Obama’s Illinois colleagues. “When they get that, it’s over for him.”

If this kind of back-and-forth continues to develop in the coming months, voters on both sides might have an unusually strong sense of why the Supreme Court matters in the choice they’re about to make.

Specifically, they’re calling him out on an amendment he offered that, in their view, threatened the delicate compromise that was holding the bill’s bipartisan coalition together.

It’s a bit of a risky move for the McCain campaign, since McCain has since disavowed the bill and promised to make border security his first priority. But given that Obama is trying to present himself as a consensus-builder, it’s worth looking at what happened.

In June 2007, Obama tried to amend the bill to end a new, merit-based system of awarding green cards after five years. In a floor speech, Obama said the policy would have ended the current system of awarding visas largely to reunite families and created “a class-based immigration system, where some people are welcome only as guest workers but never as full participants in our democracy.”

Obama’s proposal echoed the concerns of a coalition of immigration lawyers and labor groups, which said in a letter to senators that the merit-based system “disproportionately favors persons with higher education, experience in specialty occupations, and those with a mastery of the English language while diminishing the importance of family ties in the United States.”

But his proposal angered one of the bill’s supporters, McCain ally Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who lashed out at Obama in a floor speech circulated this weekend by the McCain campaign. “It means everybody over here who has walked the plank and told our base you are wrong, you are going to destroy this deal,” Graham said. “So when you are out on the campaign trail, my friend, telling about why can’t we come together, this is why.”

Obama rejected the charge. “It simply says we should examine after five years whether the program is working,” he said. “The notion that somehow that guts the bill or destroys the bill is simply disingenuous, and it is engaging in the sort of histrionics that is entirely inappropriate for this debate.”

The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle. Obama’s amendment, at the time, was considered one of several that could have unraveled the immigration coalition. Indeed, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., one of the bill’s sponsors, voted against it.

But Obama’s amendment failed, 42-55, so the unraveling didn’t happen because of his measure. Instead, the real unraveling happened later that month, when the bill failed twice to win even a majority of senators, much less the 60 votes needed to cut off debate.

In other words, the bill died pretty easily without Obama’s help.

The standard now, according to the McCain campaign, is whether Obama has ever “bucked the party line to lead on an issue of national importance.”

“He has never been a part of a bipartisan group that came together to solve a controversial issue. He has never put his career on the line for a cause greater than himself,” Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to the McCain campaign, said in the memo.

It’s a clever way to define the test in a way that ensures that Obama can’t pass it, and McCain can. It was McCain, after all, who got the campaign finance overhaul legislation signed into law in 2002, against heavy opposition from President Bush and his own leadership. It was McCain who co-chaired the “Gang of 14,” the Senate centrists who prevented a showdown over judicial filibusters in 2005. And it was McCain who forced Bush to sign the 2005 torture ban into law, which he clearly didn’t want to do.

With Obama, it’s much harder to find examples where he both “bucked the party line” and led on “an issue of national importance.” So in the coming months, you can expect the Obama campaign to lean heavily on his role in the passage of the 2007 ethics overhaul. That was the centerpiece of the campaign’s response to the McCain memo today, and it’s the only example that really gets beyond the relatively non-controversial work he has done in the rest of his brief Senate career.

Obama was one of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s hand-picked leaders of the ethics effort (the other was Russ Feingold of Wisconsin), so you could argue he wasn’t really bucking the party leadership. But government watchdog groups say Obama and Feingold did put pressure on Reid by putting together a package of proposals to make the bill more ambitious than it would have been otherwise.

And Obama did sponsor one provision, requiring lobbyists to disclose the “bundling” of contributions they collect for campaigns, that got him into a scrap with Charles E. Schumer of New York, the vice chairman of the Senate Democratic Conference and chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Schumer — who later supported Hillary Rodham Clinton against Obama in the primaries — is no wallflower, so that episode could count as bucking the party leadership.

Still, it will be hard for Obama to match McCain if the contest is defined as who has been the bigger rebel against the party line. As I argued in a January piece on Obama and Clinton’s Senate records, neither one has taken as many risks in their Senate career as McCain has.

But since those risks also include plenty of votes to continue the Iraq war, it’s probably not a good idea for McCain to rely too much on his Senate record to win the election for him.

Obama dropped by the Senate tonight to vote for a bill to block a 10 percent cut in Medicare physician payment rates, followed by a vote for an emergency war spending bill that includes an expansion of educational benefits for veterans.

The war spending bill passed, but the Medicare bill fell just short of the 60 votes it needed to end debate, triggering a tongue-lashing from Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

“We are seeing another partisan game being played in front of the American people,” Reid said, waving a pencil as Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky looked on stiffly.

And the two began to bicker over which party was to blame for the fact that the payment cuts would probably take place and Medicare patients would find it harder to find doctors who would take them.

So what was Obama doing this whole time? Kicking back in a seat in the Senate chamber, chatting with his Illinois colleague, Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin — and, at one point, Hillary Rodham Clinton. As if healing the party was all that mattered.

Reid: “Is it any wonder that Mississippi sent us a Democratic House member? They did that because they see what’s going on over here.”

Obama and Clinton: “Blah blah blah.”

McConnell: “What in the world does that have to do with the subject matter before us?”

Obama and Durbin: “Blah blah blah.”

Reid: “You’re worried about a veto from the president? Gee whiz, who would be afraid of him? He’s got a 29 percent approval rating!”

Obama and Durbin: “Blah blah blah.”

So the Medicare cuts will take effect next week, and senior citizens might have a harder time finding doctors. But at least Obama and Clinton seemed to be getting along okay.

One step at a time.

CQ photo / Scott J. Ferrell

After postponing the meeting last week because of House votes, Barack Obama finally got to meet with members of the Democratic women’s caucus this afternoon. And no more than 15 minutes after he arrived, the House called another series of votes.

No matter. Everyone just talked fast.

So far, at least, there are no reports of any serious venting at the meeting at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, even among the members who supported Hillary Rodham Clinton. For the most part, they just talked about campaign nuts and bolts, such as what to do to win their districts, which issues to stress, where to visit, etc.

“It was all positive, where do we go from here,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey of California, who had supported Clinton in the primaries.

Obama gave a short speech at the beginning, participants said, and then offered to listen to whatever they had to say.

“He just said, ‘Look, most of you know where I’m at, I appreciate everything you’re doing, I know some of you were on the other side, I’m a Hillary fan too,’ ” said Rep. Melissa Bean of Illinois, an Obama supporter.

For the most part, the women who attended just offered constructive advice, Bean said — and urged him to remind voters, at every possible opportunity, of John McCain’s support for restrictions on abortion.

“People just said, ‘Look, here’s what we’re doing in our state, and here’s where you need to go, and by the way, don’t forget to remind people that McCain is anti-choice,” Bean said. “He said, ‘Yeah, I think we’ll be getting that message out there.’ “

Woolsey said she simply warned Obama that her liberal district, just north of San Francisco, will want to “make sure that he doesn’t waver” on their priorities now that he has secured the nomination. Obama is already taking heat from the left for saying he’ll support the compromise on a rewrite of electronic surveillance rules, which the Senate probably will vote on after the Fourth of July recess.

“He was a very good listener,” said Rep. Nancy Boyda of Kansas — a centrist Democrat who stayed uncommitted throughout the primaries and had kept her distance from Obama until today. She said she went to the meeting because “he’s the nominee of our party and I’d never had a chance to meet him.”

Most of the members agreed that, while Obama may still have fences to mend with some women in the Democratic caucus, most have moved on from the primary battles because they realize the bigger priority is the future of the Supreme Court, particularly if a President McCain gets to nominate more conservative justices.

“Were there some hard feelings? Sure. Was there some venting at one point? Yes,” said Bean. “But that was so two weeks ago.”

On a McCain campaign conference call with reporters this morning, Brownback — who was briefly one of McCain’s rivals for the Republican nomination — said Obama was all talk and no action when it came to working across the aisle.

“John McCain’s a maverick. He’s fought for a bipartisan fashion,” Brownback said. “I think that the biggest thing I’ve seen from Barack Obama is a willingness, aggressiveness, to talk bipartisan and yet to vote the hard left — most liberal member of the United States Senate.”

So Obama’s rapid-response team quickly fired off an e-mail listing the projects on which he worked with Brownback. They include a Brownback bill that authorized sanctions against people who were involved with the genocide in Darfur, a version of which became law in 2006. They also teamed up on an Obama bill that required the administration to provide humanitarian relief and other aid to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Brownback also co-sponsored Obama’s bill to impose sanctions against Iran. And the two were involved — though not the principal players — in the 2006 immigration overhaul effort that McCain worked on with Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

“Their work stands as an important reminder that even in this era of increased partisan rancor, Democrats and Republicans can work together to tackle the critical challenges that all Americans agree must be met,” the Obama campaign e-mail said.

Some of Obama’s work on those issues was less intense than the campaign made it sound. He was one of 38 co-sponsors of Brownback’s Darfur legislation, and he signed on relatively late, three months after Brownback introduced it (though the two did write a Washington Post op-ed on it together). And the Iran sanctions bill was originally written by Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts.

Still, other Republican surrogates have now been put on notice: If they’ve ever worked with Obama on anything, his people are keeping a file on it.

“Who says Gordon Smith helped lead the fight for better gas mileage and a cleaner environment? Barack Obama,” the ad says. “He joined with Gordon and broke through a 20-year deadlock to pass new laws which increased gas mileage for automobiles.”

The ad highlights an Obama press release from 2006 about a bill he, Republican Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, Smith, and several others introduced to reduce gasoline consumption by requiring the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to increase fuel economy standards by a “target” of one mile per gallon each year.

In case anyone missed the message, Smith hammers it at the end of the ad: “I’m Gordon Smith, and I approve working together across party lines — and this ad.”

It’s an odd re-election strategy for a senator who, just a few weeks ago, was telling me all about how it was John McCain who had the real record of bipartisan accomplishment in the Senate, while Obama had barely done anything.

“No one has shown less partisanship and more independence from his party than Sen. McCain. That’s just a fact,” Smith said in my piece about independent voters.

Still, it’s not so surprising after a quick look at the most recent polls on the presidential race, including the double-digit lead Obama held over McCain in a Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll released today.

CQPolitics rates Smith’s re-election race as Leans Republican, meaning he has an edge but will have to fight to keep his seat against a challenge from state House Speaker Jeff Merkley.

And unfortunately for Smith, Obama isn’t returning the love.

“Barack Obama has a long record of bipartisan accomplishment and we appreciate that it is respected by his Democratic and Republican colleagues in the Senate,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement last night. “But in this race, Oregonians should know that Barack Obama supports Jeff Merkley for Senate. Merkley will help Obama bring about the fundamental change we need in Washington.”

This morning, her press office sent word that she'd come to the weekly Senate Democratic luncheon in a room just off the Senate chamber, sometime between 12:45 and 1 p.m. The best place to get pictures, we were told, was just outside the Capitol near a first-floor entrance frequently used by the senators.

So all the camera crews, and a few dozen reporters, showed up at the designated time and waited for her SUV to drive up. A crowd of about 50 tourists got wind of her arrival too (imagine that), and stood on the Capitol steps, waiting patiently for the show to begin.

A press gallery staff member eased the camera crews back, clearing a space so Clinton could walk up the steps to shake hands with the tourists. "Move back seven steps, please! You'll still get the shot!" Clinton would not be speaking to the press, her aides said, but she'd talk to them after the luncheon was over.

At about 1:10, Clinton arrived to cheers from the crowd. She walked out into the driveway, smiled and waved to the crowd, and made her way through the crowd of tourists as she walked up the steps.

"Hi back there!" Clinton said to one tourist who couldn't reach her to shake hands.

"We missed you!" said one woman closer in. "Thank you! Good to see you!" Clinton said, still smiling and shaking hands.

Then she walked the rest of the way up the steps into the Senate Democratic luncheon, where her old friends - Sens.. Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, and, of course, Charles E. Schumer of New York - were waiting to greet her.

Oh yes - and Vice President Dick Cheney showed up too, arriving in his motorcade about 20 minutes before Clinton showed up. He emerged from his SUV, walked out in the darkness of the covered entrance, and disappeared into the Capitol. The tourists didn't care.

On a conference call with reporters this morning, Jason Furman, Obama's director of economic policy, said McCain's speech on energy policy this morning overlooked his record of voting for stricter corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE standards, in 2002, 2003 and 2005. Obama's rapid-response team later cited these same three votes in an e-mail titled, "Rhetoric vs. Reality: McCain & Fuel Efficiency."

The 2003 and 2005 votes check out. McCain did, in fact, vote against amendments by Democratic Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois - now the Senate majority whip - because he thought they went so far in requiring better gas mileage that they would have hurt the economy.

The 2002 vote, however, was against a version that was meant to undercut the amendment McCain was sponsoring with Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts - against heavy opposition from the auto industry and business groups.

In the debate on that year's energy bill, Kerry and McCain wanted to increase the mileage standards to 36 miles per gallon by 2015. Instead, the Senate approved a version by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri that only would have required the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to increase the standards by some amount within two years.

It didn't say how much, and it would have allowed the agency to consider economic cost as a factor when it decided what standards to set. At the time, McCain and Kerry said it was highly unlikely that the agency, with a small budget and staff, would come up with an aggressive standard. The vote cited by Obama's campaign was McCain's vote against the overall energy bill, which had the Levin version of the mileage standards in it.

It's a classic example of how the context of a senator's vote can get lost in the heat of a campaign. McCain seems to have taken a nuanced position on mileage standards, preferring something stricter than Levin's version but less strict than Durbin's. But as Kerry found out as the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee - and McCain is finding out now - senators who run for president don't get rewarded for nuances.

As a practical matter, though, the pledge is essentially meaningless. Obama would only get his chance if a) Senate Democrats get an agreement with Republicans to allow a vote on stripping out the immunity language, and b) if it takes place at a time when Obama can fly back from the campaign trail to vote on it.

At this moment, neither one is a certainty. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants to set up a vote on getting rid of the immunity, but doesn't have an agreement yet. And if he gets one, it will be because of c): the vote won't even come close to succeeding.

Not surprisingly, liberal groups are furious that Obama would even consider supporting a compromise that would allow warrantless surveillance of suspected terrorists to continue. MoveOn.org, the liberal group that strongly supported Obama in his primary fight against Hillary Rodham Clinton, is telling its members to flood Obama's campaign with phone calls urging him to block the compromise completely.

But that's not going to happen, and it's because Obama, eyeing the national security responsibilities he just might have next year, has decided the ability to monitor overseas suspect is one executive power he needs to have.

At a press conference in Jacksonville, Fla., on Friday, Obama said he could live with the compromise because it says the warrantless surveillance program has to comply with the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, unlike the version the Bush administration launched after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I think what's clear is, is that the way the program operated broke the law that was existing at the time," Obama said. "On the other hand, what I've also seen and learned is the degree to which the underlying program itself is, in fact, necessary to help prevent terrorist attacks."

By placing the program squarely within the 1978 law and putting it under the scrutiny of a special court, Obama said, the compromise "provides the oversight that I sought."

Many of his supporters won't be happy with those restrictions, of course. But it looks like that's all they're going to get.