More Comings And Goings For McCain

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) began reassembling the presidential campaign staff he had let go months ago, even as he continued to lose other employees who left out of loyalty to his recently departed top advisers, campaign manager Terry Nelson and strategist John Weaver.

Ed Failor and Karen Slifka, two Iowa staff members for McCain, announced yesterday that they were leaving the campaign. Failor said he still supports the senator's bid for the White House but quit because "a leadership team I really believed in no longer exists now."

At the same time, McCain brought back Carla Eudy, his longtime fundraiser, who had been let go by Nelson and Weaver after the campaign's disappointing fundraising effort during the first quarter of the year.

McCain got more bad news yesterday. A Florida co-chair for his campaign was arrested on Wednesday after offering to perform oral sex on an undercover officer, the Associated Press reported.

State Rep. Bob Allen, 48, allegedly propositioned the officer after coming out of a bathroom at a park in Titusville. He was charged with solicitation for prostitution, for which he could be jailed for up to a year, the AP reported. Allen has denied guilt and called the charges "an ugly and unpleasant situation."

-- Michael D. Shear

Candidates at NAACP Forum

The eight leading Democratic presidential contenders gathered in Detroit yesterday for an NAACP forum and delivered remarks about gun violence, health care, trade and voter disenfranchisement.

Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) got rousing applause for several of his answers -- as well as for his closing comments, in which he challenged voters to look at his record on urban issues over the past two decades.

People should examine "not what we've said over the last two hours but what we've done over the last 20 years," said Obama, a former community organizer in Chicago. "I want you to look not at sound bites but at sound works."

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) called for a return to the conditions created in the 1990s, when, she suggested, the nation's economic strength created during her husband's presidency helped reduce violence in the streets. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.), on the same question of gun violence, deplored the "coarseness of our society, the celebration of violence."