Erskine Bowles

When he stopped by Craven Community College to campaign for votes last week, Erskine Bowles, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate, was deep in Jesse Helms country. The 18- to 20-year-olds in his audience had grown up flanked by tobacco farms and military installations. The college has a vibrant Bible Club, but when a teacher tried to form a group to oppose the war in Iraq, he couldn't round up enough students to qualify as a club under school rules.

Determined to ensure their work lives on, the co-chairmen of the bipartisan deficit commission appointed by President Obama have gone rogue, working Capitol Hill to pressure lawmakers to consider their proposals to tackle the nation's debt challenges. Erskine Bowles, a former Clinton administration official, and Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, launched Tuesday what they called the "Moment of Truth Project," adopting the title of the final report issued by the panel they led, the Bipartisan Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

Given the suffering of small businesses in Los Angeles in the wake of riots and recession, Erskine Bowles, director of the Small Business Administration, probably was braced for an earful of complaints when he met face to face with its business people on Tuesday. On that score, the audience of 270 gathered at the Davidson Conference Center on the campus of the University of Southern California did not disappoint the former North Carolina investment banker.

Go Saints! Oh, the Saints aren't in the Super Bowl this year? Never mind. I don't really care who's in it, I just show up to the party, over-hug the hostess, comment on all the wonderful things they've done with the house. "Wow, new kitchen?" "No. " "Must be all that great food, then," I say, then over-hug the hostess again and wander off to eat my weight in chicken wings. Yeah, you can fake a Super Bowl. Just follow me. Here's how to have a great time Sunday, even if you're not a big football fan, on the biggest social occasion of the year: ?

Erskine Bowles, a White House chief of staff during the Clinton administration, jumped into the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina, the second nationally known candidate to vie for the seat being relinquished by Sen. Jesse Helms. Bowles, a 56-year-old Charlotte, N.C., merchant banker, said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted him to reconsider an earlier decision not to seek elected office.

For weeks, Republicans hammered at Democratic Senate candidate Erskine Bowles for avoiding links to his former boss, President Clinton. Now those attacks will be a little harder to make. New TV ads airing this week show Bowles, a former White House chief of staff, with his old boss. The 30-second spots tout Bowles' part in the government's response to the April 19, 1995, bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Whitewater prosecutors questioned President Clinton's top deputy before a federal grand jury Tuesday, possibly about whether he tried to buy the silence of a key witness. "Absolutely not," White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles told reporters as he entered the courthouse. Bowles emerged from five hours of testimony to say that his appearance had taken so long because he was providing "background."

Three days after his election to a second term, President Clinton opened the door Friday to an extended deployment of U.S. troops in Bosnia, a step that he carefully avoided throughout his reelection campaign. And moving publicly into the business of renewing his administration, the president accepted the resignation of Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta and announced at a White House news conference that he had chosen Erskine Bowles as Panetta's replacement.

It was after midnight when President Clinton summoned his chief of staff to the presidential quarters in Beijing during his trip there last June. The chore? The president wanted Erskine Bowles to join him in a complicated word game, Boggle, that had caught his fancy. Bowles, 53, ever the loyal aide, trod over to Clinton's suite and took up the challenge. Now Clinton will have to find a new game companion, golfing partner--and a new manager of his increasingly difficult White House work.

Evidence of the anxieties roiling this country town was as near as the headline announcing another factory shutdown, spelling 97 more layoffs in a region where the mood this week seemed as leaden as the chill autumn sky. News of plans to close the Alcatel plant, which manufactures fiber-optic wire in nearby Claremont, delivered another belly blow to Catawba County, which during the last two years has endured a series of cutbacks in furniture, textiles and fiber optics.

Amid wrangling over an expensive tax measure, the co-chairmen of President Obama's bipartisan fiscal commission called on the White House and lawmakers to begin seriously tackling the nation's deficit challenge in the new year. Former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and ex-Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, who led the 18-member Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, met Thursday morning with Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to discuss the panel's final report, issued last week.

With dismal frequency, popular panics sweep across our social or political landscapes, filling the airwaves and the halls of Congress with irrational fears. Healthcare "death panels," a president's supposed foreign birth ? and now, the federal deficit. Last week, deficit panic gave birth to a set of harsh proposals for federal budget cuts and tax changes from the co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a bipartisan 18-member panel created this year by President Obama and congressional leaders.

When he stopped by Craven Community College to campaign for votes last week, Erskine Bowles, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate, was deep in Jesse Helms country. The 18- to 20-year-olds in his audience had grown up flanked by tobacco farms and military installations. The college has a vibrant Bible Club, but when a teacher tried to form a group to oppose the war in Iraq, he couldn't round up enough students to qualify as a club under school rules.

Evidence of the anxieties roiling this country town was as near as the headline announcing another factory shutdown, spelling 97 more layoffs in a region where the mood this week seemed as leaden as the chill autumn sky. News of plans to close the Alcatel plant, which manufactures fiber-optic wire in nearby Claremont, delivered another belly blow to Catawba County, which during the last two years has endured a series of cutbacks in furniture, textiles and fiber optics.

For weeks, Republicans hammered at Democratic Senate candidate Erskine Bowles for avoiding links to his former boss, President Clinton. Now those attacks will be a little harder to make. New TV ads airing this week show Bowles, a former White House chief of staff, with his old boss. The 30-second spots tout Bowles' part in the government's response to the April 19, 1995, bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Erskine Bowles, a White House chief of staff during the Clinton administration, jumped into the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina, the second nationally known candidate to vie for the seat being relinquished by Sen. Jesse Helms. Bowles, a 56-year-old Charlotte, N.C., merchant banker, said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted him to reconsider an earlier decision not to seek elected office.

That John David Podesta has an appropriate fondness for roller coasters did not go without notice in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. "That will certainly serve him well here," said President Clinton, leaving unsaid the obvious: That as his new--and fourth--chief of staff, Podesta is taking over a White House staff that in its six years has climbed the heights to triumph but also knows too well the terrifying descents. Podesta, 49, will replace Erskine Bowles.

Go Saints! Oh, the Saints aren't in the Super Bowl this year? Never mind. I don't really care who's in it, I just show up to the party, over-hug the hostess, comment on all the wonderful things they've done with the house. "Wow, new kitchen?" "No. " "Must be all that great food, then," I say, then over-hug the hostess again and wander off to eat my weight in chicken wings. Yeah, you can fake a Super Bowl. Just follow me. Here's how to have a great time Sunday, even if you're not a big football fan, on the biggest social occasion of the year: ?

That John David Podesta has an appropriate fondness for roller coasters did not go without notice in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. "That will certainly serve him well here," said President Clinton, leaving unsaid the obvious: That as his new--and fourth--chief of staff, Podesta is taking over a White House staff that in its six years has climbed the heights to triumph but also knows too well the terrifying descents. Podesta, 49, will replace Erskine Bowles.

It was after midnight when President Clinton summoned his chief of staff to the presidential quarters in Beijing during his trip there last June. The chore? The president wanted Erskine Bowles to join him in a complicated word game, Boggle, that had caught his fancy. Bowles, 53, ever the loyal aide, trod over to Clinton's suite and took up the challenge. Now Clinton will have to find a new game companion, golfing partner--and a new manager of his increasingly difficult White House work.