Friday, August 10, 2007; A06

RE-MARK YOUR CALENDAR

South Carolina's Republican Party confirmed yesterday that it is moving its 2008 presidential primary forward to Jan. 19, a decision that party Chairman Katon Dawson announced in a joint appearance in Concord, N.H., with New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner. Under New Hampshire law, Gardner must set his state's primary, currently scheduled for Jan. 22, at least a week before any other.

"We are here to stand shoulder to shoulder with our friends in New Hampshire to reaffirm the important role that both of our states play in presidential politics," Dawson said.

Shoulder to shoulder with Gardner, Dawson won his moment in the political limelight by shifting his state's GOP primary two weeks earlier than it had been scheduled. But in doing so, he may have put the entire tradition of the presidential nominating system at risk.

South Carolina's move is almost certain to trigger other changes in the calendar if New Hampshire feels crowded and moves its vote to early January, and if Iowa feels crowded by New Hampshire and moves its caucuses into December.

Had Dawson selected Jan. 22, rather than Jan. 19, for the GOP primary, he might have given officials in New Hampshire and Iowa more flexibility to keep the nominating process within calendar year 2008, but that now seems unlikely. Discussions over the past few months with political leaders in the early-voting states suggest there is great reluctance to force the opening event of the 2008 nominating process into December 2007.

The system already was in stress. Now there is every possibility for a public backlash -- if not in the individual states, then collectively -- with a conclusion that the system has broken down.

-- Dan Balz and Michael D. Shear

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has implicitly admonished Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for ruling out the use of nuclear weapons in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But in a 2006 interview during her Senate reelection campaign, Clinton ruled out using nuclear weapons against Iran -- albeit in a specific situation that was being publicly discussed. After a New Yorker article raised the possibility that the Bush administration would strike Iran, Clinton said she would "certainly take nuclear weapons off the table."

"This administration has been very willing to talk about using nuclear weapons in a way we haven't seen since the dawn of a nuclear age. I think that's a terrible mistake," Clinton said in the interview. But this week, in a Democratic debate, Clinton refined her approach to exclude talking about hypothetical situations of any kind.

A Clinton spokesman, Phil Singer, said there is no comparison between what she was discussing in 2006 and what Obama said this month, when he ruled out the use of nuclear force against terrorist cells in the border region of Pakistan.

"Senator Clinton was asked to respond to specific reports that the Bush-Cheney administration was actively considering nuclear strikes on Iran even as it refused to engage diplomatically. She wasn't talking about a broad hypothetical, nor was she speaking as a presidential candidate. Given the saber-rattling that was coming from the Bush White House at the time, it was totally appropriate and necessary to respond to that report and call it the wrong policy," Singer said.

-- Anne E. Kornblut

After years of being criticized for the failed universal health-care plan she crafted during her husband's first term in office, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) apparently has had enough.

During a forum at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Las Vegas, Clinton was asked why as a candidate for president she is "still insisting" on bringing "socialized medicine" to the United States, when people are "pulling away" from similar systems in Canada and Great Britain. Worse, the questioner said, such systems hurt rather than help poor people.

"That was a string of misrepresentations about me and about the systems in other countries," Clinton started. "Number one, I have never advocated socialized medicine, and I hope all the journalists here heard that loudly and clearly because that has been a right-wing attack on me for 15 years."

Clinton's plan, which died in Congress in 1994, would have required employers to provide health-care coverage to employees through health-maintenance organizations. Insurance firms opposed the proposal, as did political conservatives who thought it removed health care -- a huge portion of the nation's economy -- from the competitive marketplace.

"Do you think Medicare is socialized medicine?" Clinton asked her inquisitor, who did not identify himself.

"To a degree," he responded.

"Well, then you are in a small minority in America," Clinton said to applause, before explaining that Medicare allows patients to choose their doctors even though the federal government foots the bill with money deducted from workers' paychecks.

Clinton then asserted that "on balance," countries with uniform national systems of health care, including Japan, Australia and Canada, offer better health care than the United States. The answer left her questioner shaking his head in disagreement.

"I can give you the statistics, and you can shake your head," Clinton said sharply. "You come and introduce yourself to the staff. And we'll try to give you some information if you're interested in being educated instead of being rhetorical."

-- Michael A. Fletcher

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee warned that nominating Mitt Romney would leave the Republican Party vulnerable to Democratic charges of flip-flopping that could endanger GOP chances of winning the White House in 2008.

Huckabee said he does not doubt the authenticity of the former Massachusetts governor's conversion on social issues, most notably abortion. "I'm just going to assume that if he says he's solidly pro-life now, he is," he said.

But during an interview for washingtonpost.com's PostTalk series, Huckabee said that would not stop Democrats from going after Romney if he becomes the nominee.

"Let's assume everything is hunky-dory with his views now," he said. "The problem is not so much where he is but where he was, and the fact that that's a change, and not just on that issue but on a number of others."

-- Chris Cillizza and Dan Balz