By Blaine Harden and Anushka Asthana
Sunday, September 24, 2006

The hotly contested U.S. Senate race in Montana devolved last week into a confusedly legalistic, ferociously partisan game of "target" shooting.

Is Sen. Conrad Burns (R) a "target" of a federal investigation into the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal? Is he a "subject" of the investigation? Or is he utterly in the clear?

The games began Monday when the executive director of the Montana Democratic Party, Jim Farrell, told a Montana TV station that Burns is indeed the "target" of the federal probe.

Except for voters familiar with the technical meaning of the word "target," as defined in a Justice Department criminal manual, the claim was not especially newsworthy. Sources familiar with the investigation have said since last November that Burns, a three-term incumbent, is one of the lawmakers under scrutiny.

The Washington Post itself has muddied the waters on this question, by writing twice in the past two months that Burns was apparently not under investigation and then running a correction that cited previous articles reporting that he was.

Burns accepted and later returned $150,000 in campaign donations from Abramoff, his lobbying firm and his clients. He pressured the Interior Department to award a $3 million grant to a wealthy Indian tribe that was an Abramoff client, according to news accounts. Abramoff himself told Vanity Fair that he and his clients received "every appropriation we wanted" from a subcommittee chaired by Burns.

On Tuesday, Erik Iverson, campaign manager for Burns, generated headlines across Montana by declaring that Farrell was maliciously off-target. He scolded the Democrats for "pushing baseless allegations" to help challenger Jon Tester, who is president of the Montana Senate.

Iverson announced that the senator's criminal lawyer had confirmed with the Justice Department that "Burns is in fact not the target" of its investigation.

But what exactly does that mean?

Not much, said Stanley M. Brand, a lawyer in Washington with decades of experience in defending prominent officials charged with corruption. He represented former White House aide George Stephanopoulos in the Whitewater investigation and former representative Dan Rostenkowski, the Illinois Democrat who pleaded guilty to mail fraud in 1996.

Brand said that distinctions in a federal criminal manual between a "target," someone the Justice Department has decided to seek charges against, and a "subject," someone under investigation who could be upgraded to a target, are largely meaningless in a practical sense.

"You can't take these distinctions to the bank, because the Justice Department can change your status whenever it wants to," Brand said. "To me, it is academic. Burns is under investigation."

Asked Friday whether Burns was under investigation, even though he may not be a target, Iverson declined to comment.

The Justice Department has made no statements about the status of any of those under investigation.

First came the soccer moms, with their SUVs and school-age children, and then the security moms, concerned about terrorism. Now there is a new group of women that campaigners say politicians should reach out to: the single, divorced and widowed.

Unmarried women account for 47 million people, or 24 percent of the electorate. But according to research by Women's Voices, Women's Vote (WVWV), many fail to turn up at the polls, citing a lack of information about the issues. In 2004, 20 million of this group -- branded "women on their own" -- did not vote, a higher proportion than their married counterparts.

WVWV has launched a campaign aiming to mobilize single women on behalf of Democratic candidates for the Nov. 7 midterm elections.

"This group of voters represents a huge untapped resource for the party and the politician smart enough to talk to them about the issues that they care about," said Page Gardner, founder and president of WVWV.

At a recent breakfast briefing in Washington, Gardner posited that women united by unmarried status share common interests and concerns, whether they are 25 or 55. However the statistics are sliced, she said, "the homogeneity among the issues that move them is incredible." The group includes those with and without children and women in relationships.

Research by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg found that the issues uniting the women also put them off President Bush and his party. A survey of unmarried women in the 50 most competitive districts revealed that their top concern was Iraq and that they overwhelmingly vote Democratic.

Just as "security moms" are credited with helping the GOP to victory in 2004, Greenberg suggested, women on their own could be the key for the Democrats. "These are base voters," he said.