saco-indonesia.com, Anggota Komisi III DPR, Fahri Hamzah, telah menilai, kesediaan Sekjen Partai Demokrat, Edhie Baskoro Yudhoyo

saco-indonesia.com, Anggota Komisi III DPR, Fahri Hamzah, telah menilai, kesediaan Sekjen Partai Demokrat, Edhie Baskoro Yudhoyono (Ibas), untuk dapat memenuhi panggilan Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK) bukanlah sesuatu yang telah istimewa.

Politisi asal Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS) itu telah menjelaskan, proses hukum bukan hanya menyangkut bersedia atau tidak.

"Ini kan bukan soal Ibas. Tidak penting Ibas bersedia atau tidak, sebab hukum harus tajam bagi semua orang," katanya kepada wartawan melalui pesan singkat, Rabu (12/2/2014) kemarin.

Namun, yang paling penting adalah harus menyoroti KPK yang telah terlihat tebang pilih dalam mengusut kasus dugaan korupsi. Dia telah mencurigai kalau lembaga pimpinan Abraham Samad itu juga sudah memiliki perjanjian dengan pihak tertentu.

"Masalahnya adalah KPK tampak sudah punya perjanjian untuk dapat mengobrak-abrik orang tertentu dan mendiamkan orang tertentu," tandasnya.

Itu yang mesti diawasi terus, mengingat KPK telah memiliki tanggung jawab dan kewajiban untuk dapat menjelaskan berbagai hal terkait tugasnya dalam melakukan pemberantasan korupsi kepada publik.

"Sebab dalam hukum atas kepastian dan kesamaan di depan hukum itu tinggi," tegasnya.

Sebelumnya, putra bungsu SBY itu telah menyatakan kesediaannya bila dipanggil KPK untuk dapat memberikan keterangan menyangkut namanya yang kerap disebut telah menerima uang USD200 ribu dari PT Permai Grup, milik Muhamad Nazaruddin.

Hal itu telah dikatakan Ibas usai menghadiri acara pelantikan Gubernur dan Wakil Gubernur Jawa Timur di Surabaya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

saco-indonesia.com, Layla Eshki (33), tak kuasa menahan decak kagumnya ketika mengamati gaun putih bermotif abstrak di bagian ujung yang dikenakan salah satu pemenang World Muslimah Beauty 2012, Deanita.

saco-indonesia.com, Tim Search and Rescue (SAR) gabungan akhirnya telah berhasil menemukan satu korban terakhir dari 3 pelajar y

saco-indonesia.com, Tim Search and Rescue (SAR) gabungan akhirnya telah berhasil menemukan satu korban terakhir dari 3 pelajar yang tenggelam di Waduk Cengklik, Boyolali, Jawa Tengah Rabu (18/12) kemarin. Korban terakhir yang telah ditemukan adalah Angel Pramana Putra yang berusia (15) tahun , dalam kondisi meninggal dunia sekitar pukul 18.43 WIB.

Kepala Basarnas Jawa Tengah , Agus Haryono yang juga ikut dalam melakukan evakuasi mengatakan, ketiga korban yang telah ditemukan tidak bisa diselamatkan lantaran tenggelamnya yang cukup lama.

"Korban pertama Hendi Pradana telah ditemukan oleh Tim Penyelam SAR Gabungan. Dua korban berikutnya telah ditemukan tertangkap oleh jaring nelayan yang mencari ikan di sekitar lokasi kejadian," ujar Agus.

Ditemui terpisah, Komandan SAR HNC Lanud Adi Soemarmo Solo, Dwiyanto juga menuturkan faktor cuaca buruk telah membuat proses evakuasi ketiga korban sempat terhambat. Kondisi air waduk yang keruh dan berlumpur juga telah membuat tim penyelam kesulitan melakukan pencarian di dasar waduk.

"Jarak pandang di dasar waduk juga sangat terbatas. Tim kami juga telah mengalami kesulitan," jelas Dwiyanto.

Seperti yang telah diketahui, tiga orang pelajar SMPN 1 Colomadu tenggelam saat perahu yang telah ditumpangi terguling pada rabu (18/12) kemarin. Pencarian 3 korban tenggelam telah sempat dihentikan pada Rabu malam, lantaran hujan dan kurangnya penerangan.

Sesuai Standar Operasional Prosedur SAR, pencarian dihentikan, untuk kemudian dilanjutkan pada Kamis pagi. Petugas pun akhirnya telah menemukan korban yaitu Christopus Satria Wibowo (15) warga Mantren Colomadu Karanganyar dan Hendi Perdana (15) warga Gedongan Colomadu, Karanganyar, pada siang hari dan sore hari.

Setelah ditemukan korban pun langsung diotopsi dan diserahkan ke pihak keluarga untuk segera dimakamkan.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

BUKIT TINGGI– Kantor Kementerian Agam Bukittinggi membolehkan jamaah calon haji  dan umrah membawa uang selain biaya

BUKIT TINGGI– Kantor Kementerian Agam Bukittinggi membolehkan jamaah calon haji  dan umrah membawa uang selain biaya hidup (living cost) yang akan diberikan sebesar 1.500 real Saudi. “Jamaah dibolehkan membawa uang selain biaya hidup yang diberikan itu, bisa saja untuk keperluan lainnya,” kata Kasi Haji dan Umroh Kantor Kementerian Agama Bukittinggi, Khamidir, Selasa (3/9).

Hanya saja, imbuhnya, pada saat ibadah di Masjidil Haram agar tidak membawanya mengingat kemungkinan kehilangan uang di tempat itu sangat besar. Kepada jamaah yang membawa uang banyak hendaknya tetap menyimpan uang di dalam tas dan kamar terkunci di pemondokannya, kata dia.

Menurut dia, menyimpan uang dalam tas dan kamar terkunci di pemondokan akan paling aman dibanding membawa uang kemana-mana.

Dia menyebutkan ada 252 calon jamaah haji asal Kota Bukittinggi berangkat menuju Mekkah Al-Mukarramah. Mereka tergabung kloter dua pada gelombang pertama melalui Bandara Internasional Minangkabau.

Pemberangkatan itu kata dia, dilakukan pada 10 September 2013 dari Bukittinggi menuju embarkasi Padang. Di embarkasi Padang, jamaah calon haji menginap semalam, menjalani pemeriksaan kesehatan dan pemberian gelang.

“Sebelum keberangkatan masing-masing jamaah calon haji akan memperoleh biaya hidup (living cost) selama di Arab Saudi sebesar 1.500 real Saudi atau setara dengan Rp3,7 juta,” kata dia. Ia menyebutkan, jamaah calon haji asal Kota Bukittinggi itu telah siap menuju Mekkah karena semuanya telah melakukan pelunasan ongkos naik haji (ONH).

Sebelum adanya pengurangan 20 persen, kata dia, awalnya jamaah calon haji asal Kota Bukittinggi yang akan diberangkatkan tahun ini berjumlah 343 orang. “Karena terjadinya pengurangan 20 persen atau sebanyak 21 orang tersebut, maka jamaah calon haji yang akan diberangkatkan tahun ini menjadi 252 orang,” kata dia.

Sebenarnya, kata dia, jamaah calon haji awalnya 343 orang tersebut semuanya telah melunasi ONH, terjadinya pengurangan terpaksa penundaan pemberangkatan dilakukan bagi mereka yang porsi tinggi.
“Porsi jamaah calon haji Sumatera Barat 3.700 sehingga mereka yang lewat dari porsi tersebut ditunda pemberangkatannya,” kata dia.

Satu kloter CJH berjumlah 374, maka jamaah calon haji Bukittinggi 252 orang itu digabung dengan jemaah calon haji Solok 113 orang dan Padang sebanyak empat orang untuk memenuhi satu kloter, katanya.

Sumber : http://www.jurnalhaji.com

Baca Artikel Lainnya : TIPS MEMILIH AGEN TRAVEL

Bisnis Rental Mobil atau Jasa Sewa Mobil juga merupakan salah satu bisnis yang menjanjikan. Hal ini dikarenakan kebutuhan akan k

Bisnis Rental Mobil atau Jasa Sewa Mobil juga merupakan salah satu bisnis yang menjanjikan. Hal ini dikarenakan kebutuhan akan kendaraan mobil sebagai alat transportasi sangat tinggi. Kebutuhan akan rental mobil semakin meningkat, hal ini juga dapat dilihat dari semakin banyak jumlah rental mobil yang bermunculan. Bila tidak permintaan akan rental mobil tentunya bisnis ini tidak akan berkembang pesat seperti sekarang ini.

Tips Bisnis Rental Mobil

rental mobilBisnis Rental Mobil akhir-akhir ini mulai banyak orang yang melakoni nya, telah membuat persaingan nya semakin tinggi. Bagi anda yang tertarik dan ingin memulai bisnis rental mobil, sebaiknya mengetahui beberapa tips sebelum memulai bisnis rental mobil ini. Berikut ini beberapa tips memulai bisnis rental mobil.

    Modal atau pendanaan yang mencukupi. Modal adalah salah faktor utama dalam membangun bisnis, tanpa adanya modal yang mencukupi kita tidak dapat memulai suatu usaha. Modal terutama dalam bisnis rental mobil memang membutuhkan jumlah yang cukup besar. Seperti yang diketahui harga sebuah mobil saja membutuhkan dana yang cukup besar. Jadi pembelian mobil merupakan jumlah dana yang paling besar.
    Tempat usaha yang strategis. Salah faktor keberhasilan suatu bisnis adalah dari lokasi tempat usahanya. Pilihlah tempat usaha yang ramai dikunjungi dan mudah dilihat oleh orang, hal ini agar orang dapat dengan mudah mengetahuinya. Walaupun orang tidak atau belum menggunakan jasa kita ketika mengetahui tempat rental mobil milik kita, namun untuk kedepannya apabila orang membutuhkan rental mobil maka mereka akan ingat dan tahu dimana mereka akan menemukannya.
    Pemilihan mobil yang tepat. Untuk bisnis rental mobil, sangat penting mengetahui jenis mobil yang tepat untuk rental. Ketahui jenis mobil yang paling banyak disukai konsumen, selain itu pilih juga mobil yang awet serta mudah dalam perawatannya.
    Persiapkan tenaga ahli dalam mengelola bisnis rental mobil. Gunakan tenaga ahli yang terbiasa dengan bisnis rental mobil, dimana mereka yang bertugas dalam urusan me manage jalannya bisnis ini. Pemilihan supir juga harus diperhatikan, apabila kita menyediakan jasa rental mobil sekaligus dengan supirnya. Pilih juga tenaga teknis yang berpengalaman dalam mengurus mobil, sehingga dapat merawat dan memperbaiki mobil-mobil yang ada.
    Berikan servis terbaik kepada konsumen. Berikan jasa terbaik kepada konsumen dengan memberikan pelayanan terbaik. Hal ini dapat kita berikan dengan memberikan service antar jemput misalnya, sehingga konsumen tidak perlu repot-repot dating ketempat kita. Masih banyak pelayanan lainnya yang dapat diberikan, tergantung bagaimana kita dalam memberikannya. Kini konsumen lebih pintar karena telah mengetahui Tips Sewa Mobil di Jakarta sehingga dapat memilih akan menggunakan jasa rental mobil.
    Asuransikan semua mobil. Hal ini sangat penting, untuk mencegah hal yang tidak diinginkan seperti rusaknya mobil karena kecelakaan atau mobil hilang. Dengan adanya asuransi setidaknya segala kerugian yang ada telah ditangani oleh pihak asuransi.

Dengan mengetahui beberapa tips untuk memulai bisnis rental mobil ini semoga dapat membantu bagi yang ingin mencoba bisnis yang menguntungkan ini. Hal terpenting dalam berbisnis adalah selalu pantang menyerah, jujur dan ciptakan inovasi-inovasi yang dapat menjadi bisnis kita lebih dipilih konsumen dibandingkan dengan kompetitor lainnya.

saco-indonesia.com, Menjelang malam tahun baru, keamanan di Jakarta akan semakin diperketat. Di wilayah Jakarta Timur, sebanyak

saco-indonesia.com, Menjelang malam tahun baru, keamanan di Jakarta akan semakin diperketat. Di wilayah Jakarta Timur, sebanyak 2.000 personel kepolisian akan diterjunkan untuk dapat mengamankan perayaan malam tahun baru di beberapa titik keramaian.

Kapolres Jakarta Timur, Kombes Mulyadi Kaharni juga mengatakan, di wilayah hukumnya ini, penjagaan juga akan diperketat di kawasan Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (TMII) yang diprediksi sebagai titik kumpul para warga.

"Jelang malam pergantian tahun, Polres Jakarta Timur telah menurunkan sebanyak 2.000 personel. Hal itu untuk dapat menjaga keamanan wilayah agar kondusif," kata Mulyadi, Selasa (31/12).

Mulyadi juga menjelaskan, 2.000 personel tersebut telah terdiri dari 1.200 anggota polres dan 800 anggota gabungan dari setiap polsek yang ada di Jakarta Timur. Mulyadi juga menambahkan, untuk dapat mengantisipasi hal-hal yang tidak diinginkan, beberapa anggota kepolisian juga akan diberikan persenjataan yang lengkap nantinya.

"Kita fokuskan di TMII karena pusat perayaan di Jakarta Timur di situ. Dan saya perintahkan kepada anggota agar tetap untuk berjaga-jaga juga usai perayaan malam tahun baru," ucapnya.

Sementara untuk dapat mencegah terjadinya kemacetan, Mulyadi juga menambahkan, akan melakukan pengalihan arus lalu lintas di beberapa titik wilayah agar tidak terjadi penumpukan, kendaraan yang datang dari wilayah Jakarta Pusat maupun Utara.

"Sama seperti tahun-tahun sebelumnya, kita kebagian macetnya saja karena pusat kegiatan perayaan terbesar ada di Jakarta Pusat dan Ancol. Makanya nanti kita akan alihkan beberapa jalan ke wilayah lain," tandasnya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

saco-indonesia.com, 400 Anggota gabungan TNI, Polri, dan Pemda DKI telah membersihkan gundukan lumpur yang terdapat di bagian sa

saco-indonesia.com, 400 Anggota gabungan TNI, Polri, dan Pemda DKI telah membersihkan gundukan lumpur yang terdapat di bagian samping gedung SMAN 8, Bukit Duri, Tebet, Jakarta Selatan. Gundukan lumpur setinggi sekitar 25 sentimeter tersebut telah dimasukkan ke dalam ribuan karung yang telah disiapkan.

Dandim Jakarta Selatan Letkol Infantri Ali Aminudin telah menuturkan lokasi tersebut juga merupakan salah satu daerah yang terparah terendam banjir di wilayah Tebet, Jakarta Selatan.

"Sudah 1.500 karung yang telah diangkut. Karya bakti bersama ini telah dilakukan di Jakarta Selatan terutama di sektor 1 yakni wilayah Tebet dan nanti di sektor 2 wilayah Pancoran," ujar Ali saat ditemui di lokasi, Senin (27/1).

Ali juga menambahkan, sejumlah alat berat pun juga dikerahkan guna untuk mengeruk lumpur yang menumpuk di kawasan itu. Lima unit mobil pemadam kebakaran digunakan untuk dapat membersihkan sisa lumpur.

"Setiap anggota menggunakan sekop untuk dapat memasukkan lumpur ke dalam karung, kemudian lumpur juga dikeruk dengan 2 unit loader dan diangkut oleh 3 unit truk. Dari pemadam kebakaran ada 5 unit," jelasnya.

Saat ini, masih ada ratusan karung yang menunggu untuk diangkut. Setelah mengangkut tumpukan lumpur, sisa lumpur dibersihkan dengan cara disiram dengan menggunakan mobil pemadam kebakaran.

"Sekarang tinggal finishing yaitu pembersihan dengan air. Tapi itu masih ada lumpur yang masih diangkut," ujar Ali seraya menunjuk tumpukan lumpur yang ada di dalam selokan air.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Over the last five years or so, it seemed there was little that Dean G. Skelos, the majority leader of the New York Senate, would not do for his son.

He pressed a powerful real estate executive to provide commissions to his son, a 32-year-old title insurance salesman, according to a federal criminal complaint. He helped get him a job at an environmental company and employed his influence to help the company get government work. He used his office to push natural gas drilling regulations that would have increased his son’s commissions.

He even tried to direct part of a $5.4 billion state budget windfall to fund government contracts that the company was seeking. And when the company was close to securing a storm-water contract from Nassau County, the senator, through an intermediary, pressured the company to pay his son more — or risk having the senator subvert the bid.

The criminal complaint, unsealed on Monday, lays out corruption charges against Senator Skelos and his son, Adam B. Skelos, the latest scandal to seize Albany, and potentially alter its power structure.

Photo

 

The repeated and diverse efforts by Senator Skelos, a Long Island Republican, to use what prosecutors said was his political influence to find work, or at least income, for his son could send both men to federal prison. If they are convicted of all six charges against them, they face up to 20 years in prison for each of four of the six counts and up to 10 years for the remaining two.

Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, of Long Island, who serves as chairman of the Republican conference, emerged from a closed-door meeting Monday night to say that conference members agreed that Mr. Skelos should be benefited the “presumption of innocence,” and would stay in his leadership role.

“The leader has indicated he would like to remain as leader,” said Mr. LaValle, “and he has the support of the conference.” The case against Mr. Skelos and his son grew out of a broader inquiry into political corruption by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, that has already changed the face of the state capital. It is based in part, according to the six-count complaint, on conversations secretly recorded by one of two cooperating witnesses, and wiretaps on the cellphones of the senator and his son. Those recordings revealed that both men were concerned about electronic surveillance, and illustrated the son’s unsuccessful efforts to thwart it.

Adam Skelos took to using a “burner” phone, the complaint says, and told his father he wanted them to speak through a FaceTime video call in an apparent effort to avoid detection. They also used coded language at times.

At one point, Adam Skelos was recorded telling a Senate staff member of his frustration in not being able to speak openly to his father on the phone, noting that he could not “just send smoke signals or a little pigeon” carrying a message.

The 43-page complaint, sworn out by Paul M. Takla, a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlines a five-year scheme to “monetize” the senator’s official position; it also lays bare the extent to which a father sought to use his position to help his son.

The charges accuse the two men of extorting payments through a real estate developer, Glenwood Management, based on Long Island, and the environmental company, AbTech Industries, in Scottsdale, Ariz., with the expectation that the money paid to Adam Skelos — nearly $220,000 in total — would influence his father’s actions.

Glenwood, one of the state’s most prolific campaign donors, had ties to AbTech through investments in the environmental firm’s parent company by Glenwood’s founding family and a senior executive.

The accusations in the complaint portray Senator Skelos as a man who, when it came to his son, was not shy about twisting arms, even in situations that might give other arm-twisters pause.

Seeking to help his son, Senator Skelos turned to the executive at Glenwood, which develops rental apartments in New York City and has much at stake when it comes to real estate legislation in Albany. The senator urged him to direct business to his son, who sold title insurance.

After much prodding, the executive, Charles C. Dorego, engineered a $20,000 payment to Adam Skelos from a title insurance company even though he did no work for the money. But far more lucrative was a consultant position that Mr. Dorego arranged for Adam Skelos at AbTech, which seeks government contracts to treat storm water. (Mr. Dorego is not identified by name in the complaint, but referred to only as CW-1, for Cooperating Witness 1.)

Senator Skelos appeared to take an active interest in his son’s new line of work. Adam Skelos sent him several drafts of his consulting agreement with AbTech, the complaint says, as well as the final deal that was struck.

“Mazel tov,” his father replied.

Senator Skelos sent relevant news articles to his son, including one about a sewage leak near Albany. When AbTech wanted to seek government contracts after Hurricane Sandy, the senator got on a conference call with his son and an AbTech executive, Bjornulf White, and offered advice. (Like Mr. Dorego, Mr. White is not named in the complaint, but referred to as CW-2.)

The assistance paid off: With the senator’s help, AbTech secured a contract worth up to $12 million from Nassau County, a big break for a struggling small business.

But the money was slow to materialize. The senator expressed impatience with county officials.

Adam Skelos, in a phone call with Mr. White in late December, suggested that his father would seek to punish the county. “I tell you this, the state is not going to do a [expletive] thing for the county,” he said.

Three days later, Senator Skelos pressed his case with the Nassau County executive, Edward P. Mangano, a fellow Republican. “Somebody feels like they’re just getting jerked around the last two years,” the senator said, referring to his son in what the complaint described as “coded language.”

The next day, the senator pursued the matter, as he and Mr. Mangano attended a wake for a slain New York City police officer. Senator Skelos then reassured his son, who called him while he was still at the wake. “All claims that are in will be taken care of,” the senator said.

AbTech’s fortunes appeared to weigh on his son. At one point in January, Adam Skelos told his father that if the company did not succeed, he would “lose the ability to pay for things.”

Making matters worse, in recent months, Senator Skelos and his son appeared to grow wary about who was watching them. In addition to making calls on the burner phone, Adam Skelos said he used the FaceTime video calling “because that doesn’t show up on the phone bill,” as he told Mr. White.

In late February, Adam Skelos arranged a pair of meetings between Mr. White and state senators; AbTech needed to win state legislation that would allow its contract to move beyond its initial stages. But Senator Skelos deemed the plan too risky and caused one of the meetings to be canceled.

In another recorded call, Adam Skelos, promising to be “very, very vague” on the phone, urged his father to allow the meeting. The senator offered a warning. “Right now we are in dangerous times, Adam,” he told him.

A month later, in another phone call that was recorded by the authorities, Adam Skelos complained that his father could not give him “real advice” about AbTech while the two men were speaking over the telephone.

“You can’t talk normally,” he told his father, “because it’s like [expletive] Preet Bharara is listening to every [expletive] phone call. It’s just [expletive] frustrating.”

“It is,” his father agreed.

As he reflected on the festering wounds deepened by race and grievance that have been on painful display in America’s cities lately, President Obama on Monday found himself thinking about a young man he had just met named Malachi.

A few minutes before, in a closed-door round-table discussion at Lehman College in the Bronx, Mr. Obama had asked a group of black and Hispanic students from disadvantaged backgrounds what could be done to help them reach their goals. Several talked about counseling and guidance programs.

“Malachi, he just talked about — we should talk about love,” Mr. Obama told a crowd afterward, drifting away from his prepared remarks. “Because Malachi and I shared the fact that our dad wasn’t around and that sometimes we wondered why he wasn’t around and what had happened. But really, that’s what this comes down to is: Do we love these kids?”

Many presidents have governed during times of racial tension, but Mr. Obama is the first to see in the mirror a face that looks like those on the other side of history’s ledger. While his first term was consumed with the economy, war and health care, his second keeps coming back to the societal divide that was not bridged by his election. A president who eschewed focusing on race now seems to have found his voice again as he thinks about how to use his remaining time in office and beyond.

Continue reading the main story Video

Play Video|1:17

Obama Speaks of a ‘Sense of Unfairness’

In the aftermath of racially charged unrest in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and New York, Mr. Obama came to the Bronx on Monday for the announcement of a new nonprofit organization that is being spun off from his White House initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Staked by more than $80 million in commitments from corporations and other donors, the new group, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, will in effect provide the nucleus for Mr. Obama’s post-presidency, which will begin in January 2017.

“This will remain a mission for me and for Michelle not just for the rest of my presidency but for the rest of my life,” Mr. Obama said. “And the reason is simple,” he added. Referring to some of the youths he had just met, he said: “We see ourselves in these young men. I grew up without a dad. I grew up lost sometimes and adrift, not having a sense of a clear path. The only difference between me and a lot of other young men in this neighborhood and all across the country is that I grew up in an environment that was a little more forgiving.”

Organizers said the new alliance already had financial pledges from companies like American Express, Deloitte, Discovery Communications and News Corporation. The money will be used to help companies address obstacles facing young black and Hispanic men, provide grants to programs for disadvantaged youths, and help communities aid their populations.

Joe Echevarria, a former chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, will lead the alliance, and among those on its leadership team or advisory group are executives at PepsiCo, News Corporation, Sprint, BET and Prudential Group Insurance; former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; the music star John Legend; the retired athletes Alonzo Mourning, Jerome Bettis and Shaquille O’Neal; and the mayors of Indianapolis, Sacramento and Philadelphia.

The alliance, while nominally independent of the White House, may face some of the same questions confronting former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins another presidential campaign. Some of those donating to the alliance may have interests in government action, and skeptics may wonder whether they are trying to curry favor with the president by contributing.

“The Obama administration will have no role in deciding how donations are screened and what criteria they’ll set at the alliance for donor policies, because it’s an entirely separate entity,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One en route to New York. But he added, “I’m confident that the members of the board are well aware of the president’s commitment to transparency.”

The alliance was in the works before the disturbances last week after the death of Freddie Gray, the black man who suffered fatal injuries while in police custody in Baltimore, but it reflected the evolution of Mr. Obama’s presidency. For him, in a way, it is coming back to issues that animated him as a young community organizer and politician. It was his own struggle with race and identity, captured in his youthful memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” that stood him apart from other presidential aspirants.

But that was a side of him that he kept largely to himself through the first years of his presidency while he focused on other priorities like turning the economy around, expanding government-subsidized health care and avoiding electoral land mines en route to re-election.

After securing a second term, Mr. Obama appeared more emboldened. Just a month after his 2013 inauguration, he talked passionately about opportunity and race with a group of teenage boys in Chicago, a moment aides point to as perhaps the first time he had spoken about these issues in such a personal, powerful way as president. A few months later, he publicly lamented the death of Trayvon Martin, a black Florida teenager, saying that “could have been me 35 years ago.”

Photo

 

That case, along with public ruptures of anger over police shootings in Ferguson and elsewhere, have pushed the issue of race and law enforcement onto the public agenda. Aides said they imagined that with his presidency in its final stages, Mr. Obama might be thinking more about what comes next and causes he can advance as a private citizen.

That is not to say that his public discussion of these issues has been universally welcomed. Some conservatives said he had made matters worse by seeming in their view to blame police officers in some of the disputed cases.

“President Obama, when he was elected, could have been a unifying leader,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican candidate for president, said at a forum last week. “He has made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions.”

On the other side of the ideological spectrum, some liberal African-American activists have complained that Mr. Obama has not done enough to help downtrodden communities. While he is speaking out more, these critics argue, he has hardly used the power of the presidency to make the sort of radical change they say is necessary.

The line Mr. Obama has tried to straddle has been a serrated one. He condemns police brutality as he defends most officers as honorable. He condemns “criminals and thugs” who looted in Baltimore while expressing empathy with those trapped in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness.

In the Bronx on Monday, Mr. Obama bemoaned the death of Brian Moore, a plainclothes New York police officer who had died earlier in the day after being shot in the head Saturday on a Queens street. Most police officers are “good and honest and fair and care deeply about their communities,” even as they put their lives on the line, Mr. Obama said.

“Which is why in addressing the issues in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York, the point I made was that if we’re just looking at policing, we’re looking at it too narrowly,” he added. “If we ask the police to simply contain and control problems that we ourselves have been unwilling to invest and solve, that’s not fair to the communities, it’s not fair to the police.”

Moreover, if society writes off some people, he said, “that’s not the kind of country I want to live in; that’s not what America is about.”

His message to young men like Malachi Hernandez, who attends Boston Latin Academy in Massachusetts, is not to give up.

“I want you to know you matter,” he said. “You matter to us.”

WASHINGTON — During a training course on defending against knife attacks, a young Salt Lake City police officer asked a question: “How close can somebody get to me before I’m justified in using deadly force?”

Dennis Tueller, the instructor in that class more than three decades ago, decided to find out. In the fall of 1982, he performed a rudimentary series of tests and concluded that an armed attacker who bolted toward an officer could clear 21 feet in the time it took most officers to draw, aim and fire their weapon.

The next spring, Mr. Tueller published his findings in SWAT magazine and transformed police training in the United States. The “21-foot rule” became dogma. It has been taught in police academies around the country, accepted by courts and cited by officers to justify countless shootings, including recent episodes involving a homeless woodcarver in Seattle and a schizophrenic woman in San Francisco.

ate in February, Dr. Ben Carson, the celebrated pediatric neurosurgeon turned political insurrectionist, was trying to check off another box on his presidential-campaign to-do list: hiring a press secretary. The lead prospect, a public-relations specialist named Deana Bass, had come to meet him at the dimly lit Capitol Hill office of Carson’s confidant and business manager, Armstrong Williams. Carson sat back and scrutinized her from behind a small granite table, as life-size cardboard cutouts of more conventional politicians — President Obama, with a tight smile, and Senator John McCain, glowering — loomed behind each of his shoulders. (The mock $3 bill someone had left on a table in Williams’s waiting room undercut any notion that this was a bipartisan zone; it featured Obama wearing a turban.)

Bass seemed momentarily speechless, and not just because no one had warned her that a New York Times reporter would be sitting in on her job interview. Though she knew Williams — a jack-of-all-trades entrepreneur who owns several television stations and a public-affairs business and who hosts a daily talk-radio show — through Washington’s small circle of black conservatives, the two hadn’t spoken in years until he called her two days earlier. He had been struggling to come up with the perfect national spokesperson, he told her. Then, at the gym, her name popped into his head; Williams was fairly certain she was the one. Sitting across from a likely candidate for president, Bass was adjusting to the idea that her life might be about to take a sudden chaotic turn.

“It’s like getting the most random call on a Monday that you simply do not see coming,” she said. “Oftentimes, that is how the Lord works.”

Carson concurred: “It’s always how he works in my life.” Carson is soft-spoken and often talks with his eyes half closed, frequently punctuating his sentences with a small laugh, even if the humor of his statement is not readily apparent. Bass told Carson that she had been a Republican staff member on Capitol Hill then worked for the Republican National Committee. In 2007 she started a Christian public-relations firm with her sister. She enjoyed working on the Hill, she said, but the pay wasn’t as high as the hours were long. “We figured that we worked like slaves for other people, and we wanted to work for ourselves.”

Carson stopped her. “You know you can’t mention that word, right?” Carson waited a beat, then laughed, and Williams and Bass joined in. He was getting to the point; he needed a professional who could help him check his penchant for creating uncontrolled controversy just by talking.

The Ben Carson movement began in 2013, when Carson, a neurosurgeon, whose operating-room prowess and up-from-poverty back story had made him the subject of a television movie and a regular on the inspirational-speaking circuit, was invited to address the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. With Barack Obama sitting just two seats away, Carson warned that “moral decay” and “fiscal irresponsibility” could destroy America just as it did ancient Rome. He proposed a substitute for Obamacare — Health Savings Accounts, which, he said, would end any talk of “death panels” — and a flat-tax based on the concept of tithing. His address, combined with the president’s stony reaction, was a smash with Republican activists. Speaking and interview requests flooded in. Carson, then 61, announced his planned retirement a few weeks later, freeing his calendar to accept just about all of them. In the months that followed, his rhetoric became increasingly strident. The claim that drew the most attention, perhaps, was that Obamacare was “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”

Bass’s own use of the word prompted Carson to ask her what she thought about that incident. She considered for a moment.

“If you want to reach people and have them even understand what you’re saying, there is a way to do it, without that hyperbole, that might be. . . . ” She paused. “I just think it’s important not to shut people off before they —”

Carson jumped in. “That doesn’t allow them to hear what you’re saying?”

Bass nodded.

Likening Obamacare to slavery — and slavery was incomparably worse, Carson said — had its political advantages for a candidacy like his. It was the kind of statement that stoked the angriest of the Republican voters: conservative stalwarts who can’t hear enough bad things about Obama. This, in turn, led to more talk-radio and Fox News appearances, more book sales, more donations to the super PAC started in his name, more support in the polls. (The day before the meeting, one poll of Republican voters showed Carson statistically tied for first place with Jeb Bush and Scott Walker.)

Rhetorical excess was good for business, but Carson now wants to be seen as more than a novelty candidate. He has come to learn that such extreme analogies, while true to his views, aren’t especially presidential. They alienate more moderate voters and, perhaps even more damaging, reinforce the impression that he is not “serious” — that he is another Herman Cain, the black former Godfather’s Pizza chief executive who rose to the top of the early presidential polls in 2011 but then bowed out before the Iowa caucuses, largely because of leaked allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denied but from which he never recovered. Cain lingers as a cautionary tale for the party as much as for a right-leaning candidate like Carson. The fact that Cain, with his folksy sayings (“shucky ducky”) and misnomers (“Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan”), reached the top of the national polls — much less that he was eventually followed there by the likes of Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who all topped one or another poll in the 2012 primary season — wound up being a considerable embarrassment for the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, and for the longtime party regulars who were trying to fast-track his way to the nomination.

Carson liked Bass and, without directly saying so, made it clear the job was hers for the taking. Carson’s campaign chairman, Terry Giles — a white lawyer whose clients have included the comedian Richard Pryor and the stepson of the model Anna Nicole Smith and who helped reconcile the business interests of the descendants of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — had assembled a mostly white campaign team, including many from the 2012 Gingrich effort, and Carson wanted a person of color to speak for him. Bass said she would have to mull it over, pray about it. Carson nodded approvingly. “Pray about it,” he said. “See what you think.”

Williams knew the party was intent on protecting the eventual 2016 nominee from the same embarrassment Romney suffered. Already, suspiciously tough articles about Carson were showing up in conservative magazines and on right-wing websites. “They’re protecting these establishment candidates,” Williams said. “This is coming from within the house. This is family.” At the very least, he wanted to make sure that Carson didn’t do their work for them. (Carson would commit another unforced error a week later, when he told CNN that homosexuality was clearly a choice, because a lot of people go in prison straight and “when they come out, they’re gay”; he later apologized.)

“We need somebody to protect him, sometimes, from himself,” he told Bass — laughing, but only half kidding.

A candidacy like Carson’s presents a new kind of problem to the establishment wing of the G.O.P., which, at least since 1980, has selected its presidential nominees with a routine efficiency that Democrats could only envy. The establishment candidate has usually been a current or former governor or senator, blandly Protestant, hailing from the moderate, big-business wing of the party (or at least friendly with it) and almost always a second-, third- or fourth-time national contender — someone who had waited “his turn.” These candidates would tack predictably to the right during the primaries to satisfy the evangelicals, deficit hawks, libertarian leaners and other inconvenient but vital constituents who made up the “base” of the party. In return, the base would, after a brief flirtation with some fantasy candidate like Steve Forbes or Pat Buchanan, “hold their noses” and deliver their votes come November. This bargain was always tenuous, of course, and when some of the furthest-right activists turned against George W. Bush, citing (among other apostasies) his expansion of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, it began to fall apart. After Barack Obama defeated McCain in 2008, the party’s once dependable base started to reconsider the wisdom of holding their noses at all.

Photo

 

This insurgent attitude was helped along by changes in the nomination rules. In 2010, the Republican National Committee, hoping to capture the excitement of the coast-to-coast Democratic primary competition between Obama and Hillary Clinton, introduced new voting rules that required many of the early voting states to award some delegates to losing candidates, based on their shares of the vote. The proportional voting rules would encourage struggling candidates to stay in the primaries even after successive losses, as Clinton did, because they might be able to pull together enough delegates to take the nomination in a convention-floor fight or at least use them to bargain for a prime speaking slot or cabinet post.

This shift in incentives did not go unnoticed by potential 2012 candidates, nor did changes in election law that allowed billionaire donors to form super PACs in support of pet candidacies. At the same time, increasingly widespread broadband Internet access allowed candidates to reach supporters directly with video and email appeals and supporters to send money with the tap of a smartphone, making it easier than ever for individual candidates to ignore the wishes of the party.

Into this newly chaotic Republican landscape strode Mitt Romney. There could be no doubt that it was his turn, and yet his journey to the nomination was interrupted by one against-the-odds challenger after another — Cain, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul; always Ron Paul. It was easy to dismiss the 2012 primaries as a meaningless circus, but the onslaught did much more than tarnish the overall Republican brand. It also forced Romney to spend money he could have used against Obama and defend his right flank with embarrassing pandering that shadowed him through the general election. It was while trying to block a surge from Gingrich, for instance, that Romney told a debate audience that he was for the “self-deportation” of undocumented immigrants.

At the 2012 convention in Tampa, a group of longtime party hands, including Romney’s lawyer, Ben Ginsberg, gathered to discuss how to prevent a repeat of what had become known inside and outside the party as the “clown show.” Their aim was not just to protect the party but also to protect a potential President Romney from a primary challenge in 2016. They forced through new rules that would give future presumptive nominees more control over delegates in the event of a convention fight. They did away with the mandatory proportional delegate awards that encouraged long-shot candidacies. And, in a noticeably targeted effort, they raised the threshold that candidates needed to meet to enter their names into nomination, just as Ron Paul’s supporters were working to reach it. When John A. Boehner gaveled the rules in on a voice vote — a vote that many listeners heard as a tie, if not an outright loss — the hall erupted and a line of Ron Paul supporters walked off the floor in protest, along with many Tea Party members.

At a party meeting last winter, Reince Priebus, who as party chairman is charged with maintaining the support of all his constituencies, did restore some proportional primary and caucus voting, but only in states that held voting within a shortened two-week window. And he also condensed the nominating schedule to four and a half months from six months, and, for the first time required candidates to participate in a shortened debate schedule, determined by the party, not by the whims of the networks. (The panel that recommended those changes included names closely identified with the establishment — the former Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, the Mississippi committeeman Haley Barbour and, notably, Jeb Bush’s closest adviser, Sally Bradshaw.)

Grass-roots activists have complained that the condensed schedule robs nonestablishment candidates — “movement candidates” like Carson — of the extra time they need to build momentum, money and organizations. But Priebus, who says the nomination could be close to settled by April, said it helped all the party’s constituencies when the nominee was decided quickly. “We don’t need a six-month slice-and-dice festival,” Priebus said when we spoke in mid-March. “While I can’t always control everyone’s mouth, I can control how long we can kill each other.”

All the rules changes were built to sidestep the problems of 2012. But the 2016 field is shaping up to be vastly different and far larger. A new Republican hints that he or she is considering a run seemingly every week. There are moderates like Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and former Gov. George Pataki of New York; no-compromise conservatives like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania; business-wingers like the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina; one-of-a-kinds like Donald Trump — some 20 in all, a dozen or so who seem fairly serious about it. That opens the possibility of multiple candidates vying for all the major Republican constituencies, some of them possibly goaded along by super-PAC-funding billionaires, all of them trading wins and collecting delegates well into spring.

Giles says his candidate can capitalize on all that chaos. Rivals may laugh, but Giles argues that if Carson can make a respectable showing in Iowa, then win in South Carolina — or at least come in second should a home-state senator, Lindsey Graham, run — and come in second behind Bush or Senator Marco Rubio in their home state of Florida, he could be positioned to make a real run. But that would depend on avoiding pitfalls like Carson’s ill-considered comments on homosexuality. Rather than capitalizing on the chaos, Carson may only contribute to it.

Ben Carson is, in many ways, the ideal Republican presidential candidate. With a not-too-selective reading of his life story, conservative voters can — and do — see in him an inspiring, up-from-nowhere African-American who shares their beliefs, a right-wing answer to Barack Obama. Before he was born, his parents moved to Detroit from rural Tennessee as part of the second great migration. His father, Robert Solomon Carson, worked at a Cadillac factory. His mother, Sonya — who herself had grown up as one of 24 children and left school at third grade — cleaned houses. When Carson was 8, Sonya discovered that Robert was keeping a second family. She moved, with her two sons, into a rundown group house. It was in a part of town that Carson described to me as crawling with “big rats and roaches and all kinds of horrible things.” Sonya worked several jobs at a time and made up the shortfall with food stamps. (Carson has called for paring back the social safety net but not doing away with it.)

Carson recounts this story in his best-selling 1990 memoir, “Gifted Hands,” which also became the basis for a 2009 movie on TNT, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. as Carson. Raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, Carson realized that he wanted to become a physician during a church sermon about a missionary doctor who, while serving overseas, was almost attacked by thieves but found safety by putting his faith in God. When Carson, then 8, told his mother his new dream, “She said, ‘Absolutely, you could do it, you could do anything,’ ” he told me. Forced by his mother to read two extra books a week, he made it to Yale, then to medical school at the University of Michigan, where he decided to specialize in neurosurgery. He was selected for residency at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, where he was named director of pediatric neurosurgery at 33, becoming the youngest person, and the first black person, to hold the title. He drew national attention by conducting a succession of operations that had never been performed successfully, most famously planning and managing the first separation of conjoined twins connected through major blood vessels in the brain.

Carson, a two-time Jimmy Carter voter, traces his conservative political awakening to a patient he met during the Reagan years. During a routine obstetrics rotation, he found himself treating an unwed pregnant teenager who had run away from her well-to-do parents. When Carson asked her how she was getting by, she informed him she was on public assistance; this led him to ponder the fact that the government was paying for the result of what he did not view as a “wise decision.” The incident, he says, fed his growing sense that the welfare system too often saps motivation and rewards irresponsible behavior. (When we spoke, he suggested that the government should cut off assistance to would-be unwed mothers, but only after warning them that it would do so within a certain amount of time, say five years. “I bet you’d see a dramatic decrease in unwed motherhood.”)

Carson’s friends at Hopkins say they do not remember him being particularly outspoken about his conservatism. He devoted most of his public engagement to urging poor kids in bad neighborhoods to use “these fancy brains God gave us,” through weekly school visits, student hospital tours and, ultimately, a multimillion-dollar scholarship program. “His issues were always medical care for the poor, education for the poor, equal opportunity — helping the less fortunate and really inspiring them as an example,” a mentor who named him to the chief pediatrics-neurosurgery post at Hopkins, Dr. Donlin Long, told me.

Even when Carson got the chance, in 1997, to speak in front of President Bill Clinton, at the national prayer breakfast, he mostly discussed the lack of role models for black children who were not sports stars or rappers. (There was possibly an oblique reference to Clinton’s sex scandals, when he told the audience that, if they are always honest, they won’t have to worry later about “skeletons in the closet.”)

Photo

 

In 2011, Carson’s politics took a strident turn, mirroring that of many in his party during the Obama years. “America the Beautiful,” his sixth book, which he wrote with Candy Carson, his wife of 39 years, included a get-tough-on-illegal-immigration message and offered anti-establishment praise for the Tea Party. It suggested that blacks who voted for Obama only because he was black were themselves practicing a form of racism. (Earlier this year he admitted to Buzzfeed that portions of the book were lifted directly from several sources without proper attribution.) His prayer-breakfast performance in 2013, and the extremity of his remarks in the months afterward (Obamacare is the worst thing since slavery; the United States is “very much like Nazi Germany”; allowing same-sex marriage could lead to allowing bestiality), left some of his old friends bewildered. Students at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine protested his planned convocation address there in 2013, and he eventually backed out. When I asked Carson about the view at Hopkins that he had changed, he said his themes are still the same: “hard work, self-reliance, helping other people.” If he had become more overtly political, he said, it was only because the Obama years had led him to believe that “we’re really moving in a direction that is very, very destructive.”

None of this went unnoticed by campaign professionals. In August 2013, John Philip Sousa IV and Vernon Robinson, each of whom professes to be a virtual stranger to Carson, and who had previously been active in the anti-illegal-immigration movement, started the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee. Sousa was just coming off a campaign to defend the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio, from a recall effort, and he told me that he found Carson’s lack of political experience refreshing. “We have 500 guys and gals with probably a collective 5,000 years experience, and look at the mess we’re in,” he said.

Many others in the party feel the same way. Carson’s PAC finished 2014 with more than $13 million in donations, more than Ready for Hillary. Much of its money has gone toward further fund-raising, but Sousa — the great-grandson of the famous composer — points out that their effort has already built far more than just a war chest, organizing leaders in all 99 of Iowa’s counties. Regardless, Carson credits the fund-raising success of Sousa and Robinson with persuading him to enter the race.

Very early the morning after the job interview, Carson was in a black S.U.V., heading from Washington to the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Md., where he was to give the opening candidate speech of the Conservative Political Action Conference. The event, which functions as an early tryout for Republican presidential contenders, tends to skew rightward in its audience, drawing many of the same sorts of people who shouted at Boehner in Tampa. As such, it tends to favor anti-establishment candidates, but the news leading up to this year’s event was that Jeb Bush hoped to make inroads there.

It was still dark when we set out, and I joked with Carson about the hour, telling him he’d better get used to it. He retorted that his career in pediatric brain surgery made him no stranger to early mornings. This is a big theme of Carson’s presidential pitch: that neither the rigors of the campaign nor those of the White House can faze a man who held children’s lives in his hands. His life in brain surgery has prepared him for the presidency, he maintains, better than lives in politics have for his rivals. At the very least, he says, it conditioned him against getting too worked up about any problem that isn’t life threatening. “I mean, it’s grueling, but interestingly enough, I don’t feel the pressure,” he said.

At the convention hall, we were quickly surrounded by admirers. Two women were already waiting to meet him — white, middle-aged volunteers for Carson’s super PAC, who had traveled from South Carolina. One of them, Chris Horne, was holding a dog-eared and taped Bible. A founding member of the Charleston Tea Party who went on to work for Gingrich’s successful South Carolina primary campaign in 2012, Horne lamented over the attacks that Carson was sure to face. “You served us, you served the Lord, just don’t let them steal that from you,” she said. Her friend told him, “You’ve got God behind you!” Such religious evocations trailed Carson constantly while I walked the CPAC floor with him. Evangelicals are impressed not only with his devotion to their politics but also with his career path; as one of them told me, what’s more pro-life than saving babies?

During our ride to the conference, Carson told me his speech was not looking to “feed the beast.” When his appointed time came, he kept his remarks as tame as promised. “Real compassion” meant “using our intellect” to help people “climb out of dependency and realize the American dream,” he said. The national debt is going to “destroy us,” Obamacare was about “redistribution and control,” but Republicans better come forward with their own alternative before they repeal it, he said.

Because his speech was first, and it started several minutes early, the auditorium was slow to fill. Still, the first day saw a crush of people seeking autographs and pictures as he roamed the hall. The Draft Carson committee’s 150 volunteers swarmed the auditorium, collecting emails and handing out “Run Ben Run” stickers. After a quick interview with Sean Hannity, the conservative-radio and Fox News host — his second in two days — Carson was off to Tampa.

In the hours that followed his talk, the hall offered a view in miniature of what the next 12 to 14 months might hold for the party. Chris Christie, sitting across from the tough-minded talk-radio host Laura Ingraham, boasted about his multiple vetoes of Planned Parenthood funding, his refusal to raise income taxes and his belief that “sometimes people need to be told to sit down and shut up.” Cruz, an audience favorite, warning his fellow Republicans against falling for a “squishy moderate,” declared, “Take all 125,000 I.R.S. agents and put ’em on our Southern border!” Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, surging in polls, boasted that if he could face down the 100,000 union supporters who protested his legislation limiting collective bargaining for public employees, he could certainly handle ISIS. The next day, the traditional CPAC favorite Rand Paul spoke, packing the hall with his supporters who chanted “President Paul.” He warned, counter to the overall hawkish tenor of the event, that “we should not succumb to the notion that a government inept at home will somehow become successful abroad.” But he also vowed to end foreign aid to countries whose citizens are seen burning American flags. “Not one penny more to these haters of America.”

Perhaps the defining moment came near the end of the conference, when Jeb Bush spoke. In a neat trick of political gamesmanship — and a show of establishment muscle — his team had bused in an ample cheering section for the dozens of cameras on hand for his appearance. But a small contingent of Tea Party activists and Rand Paul supporters staged a walk out. When Bush began a question-and-answer session, they turned and left the auditorium to chant “U.S.A., U.S.A.” in the hallway, led by a man in colonial garb waving a huge “Don’t Tread on Me” banner. Plenty of other detractors stayed in the hall and peppered Bush’s remarks with booing as he stood by positions unpopular with the conservative grass roots: support for the Common Core standards and an immigration overhaul that provides a “path to legal status” for undocumented immigrants. Bush took it all in good humor, but finally seemed to give up.

“For those who made an ‘oo’ sound — is that what it was? — I’m marking you down as neutral,” he said. “And I want to be your second choice.”

Bush strategists told me they would not repeat Romney’s mistakes. Of course they would love to glide to an early nomination, they said, but they are prepared for a long contest and won’t be wasting any energy bending under pressure from a Paul or a Cruz or a Carson.

No one doubts that the pressure will increase, though. Despite the best wishes of the party’s leaders, GOP primary voters have given little indication that they will narrow the field quickly.

Before I left, I spotted Newt Gingrich, himself a fleeting presidential front-runner during those strange primary days of 2012. I asked him whether he thought all the party maneuvering — all the attempts to change the rules and fast-track the process — would preclude someone from presenting the sort of outside primary challenge he had carried out in the last election.

“No,” he told me, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Look at where Ben Carson is right now.”

Gagne wrestled professionally from the late 1940s until the 1980s and was a transitional figure between the early 20th century barnstormers and the steroidal sideshows of today

Mr. Napoleon was a self-taught musician whose career began in earnest with the orchestra led by Chico Marx of the Marx Brothers.

The bottle Mr. Sokolin famously broke was a 1787 Château Margaux, which was said to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Sokolin had been hoping to sell it for $519,750.