"Suddenly, macaca, Jewish heritage and racial slurs are yesterday's news. Look through Virginia's newspapers, look even at the partisan blogs that relish hitting Sen. George Allen as hard as they can: The feeding frenzy has subsided. The waters seem almost calm again.

The Allen campaign must be, as the senator's ancestors might have put it, kvelling (Yiddish for bursting with pride.) Without going through the ritual Oprah-style confessional purification, Allen and his strategists have managed to steer attention away from his awful few weeks and back onto far more comfortable turf for the one-term senator who still harbors hopes of becoming president.

How did the Allen camp achieve this remarkable turnaround? Simple. They announced that they were changing the subject. All it took was a few moves, none of them particularly exotic:

· Allen launched an "Issues, Ideas and Record Tour" of friendly locales where he talked, albeit without many specifics, about "issues."

· The campaign announced that the senator would go on TV -- not to address claims that in college he regularly used racial slurs, not to justify his verbal attack on an Indian American working for his opponent's campaign and not to explain why he reacted so negatively when asked about his family's Jewish background. No, all the campaign said was that Allen would make a "major address." That the two-minute TV ad was neither major nor much of an address didn't matter; the moment became a turning point in the Allen campaign.

· Allen strategists rolled out the candidate's wife to stand by his side -- literally -- during the "major address," smiling admiringly. Then Susan Allen sat for a Washington Post interview that helped soften the senator's image.

· Day after day, Allen presented new endorsements from blacks -- a Democratic legislator, ministers, community leaders. Message: It's okay to go back in the water.

All of this dovetailed beautifully with the Allen campaign's new offensive, a redoubled attack on Democratic challenger Jim Webb for being anti-woman because of a 27-year-old magazine piece Webb wrote arguing against enrolling women at the U.S. Naval Academy. Webb responded reasonably effectively to Allen's TV ad, but it hardly mattered. The subject had been changed.

Still, the Allen camp is hardly home free. Allen's lawyer has admitted this week that the senator failed to disclosed to Congress stock options he received after serving as a director of Commonwealth Biotechnologies Inc., a Virginia company. And even once the bleeding from macaca and the racial slurs was stanched, Allen seemed to remain on the wrong side of public opinion on the Iraq war.

Allen had taken the harshest imaginable, least independent stance in favor of the Bush policy in Iraq: Everything was going fine, no need to pull out, no need to second-guess the war effort. But now, he has used this shift in the campaign's subject matter to change direction. Here's George Allen tacking to the center, alertly taking advantage of Sen. John Warner's conversion to the skeptical side. In a conference call with reporters Friday, Allen awkwardly embraced his fellow Virginian's assessment that things are going poorly in Iraq.

Never mind that Allen's new stance -- the war is a failure, but we have to stay the course -- makes little sense. And Allen didn't go quite as far as Warner, who said that if U.S. forces don't show major progress in 30 to 60 days, it will be time for "bold action," presumably the old Monty Python battle call: "Run away!"

Despite the logical holes in his new position, Allen manages to come off as more independent and honest than many Republicans, such as Maryland Senate candidate Michael Steele (who resorted to a thinly veiled off-the-record lunch to slip in his critical comments about his party's failed foreign policy).

How has Allen been permitted to do all this? Why hasn't the Webb campaign taken advantage of the moment to raise further questions about Allen's credibility and character? Where are the stories trying to square the young man who relished using racial slurs with the senator who went on pilgrimages to absorb the story of the civil rights movement? How did Allen grow up to hold the archaic racial attitudes he seems to have proudly displayed through much of his life? What have his professional relationships with blacks been like through the years?

George Allen runs a savvy campaign and knows how to work the media and public opinion. But we still don't know what really goes on in the heart and head of Virginia's junior senator. Who will demand answers to these questions -- the Webb campaign? Editors and reporters? Virginia's voters?" (Marc Fisher, The Washington Post, October 10, 2006)

Editor's Note: An index to coverage of George Allen on the Loper website may be found at http://loper.org/~george/archives/2006/Aug/925.html