1. The idea was to vivify the statistics with short "life histories." But after Bush started talking to the vibrant young single mother she calls Ana, she got more ambitious.

2. The Republican speaker of the Idaho House, Bruce Newcomb, said this spring of Sali: "That idiot is just an absolute idiot." With an impish smile, Grant, who was a high–tech executive in Boise, took a moment from knocking on residents‘ doors here last week and said: "Can you imagine Republicans sitting around in Washington and saying to each other, ‘Jeez, now we have to spend more money to win –– in Idaho?‘ " But spending and worrying the Republicans are, here and in a handful of other usually safe House districts in the West, where unrelentingly grim news from the war in Iraq has combined with smoldering anger over federal deficits and Washington scandals to vivify Democratic candidates who not long ago were reconciled to their fate as biannual Republican roadkill.