Excerpt from the Clyde Haberman column in NYTimes:

TAKE Jonathan Tasini.

What? You never heard of him? Can’t blame you. Some may even believe that his first name is Little-known, given that he is sometimes referred to as Little-known Jonathan Tasini.

He is a labor organizer and writer who is running in the Democratic primary as an antiwar challenger to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. His chances of victory would seem to hover somewhere between nil and zilch. Even so, whatever the strengths or weaknesses of his ideas, he is a legitimate candidate who qualified for the Sept. 12 primary ballot.

Hillary in the Hamptons: Sen. Clinton arrives ready to raise funds in East End; curtails questions about debate before primary

BY CHAU LAM
Newsday Staff Writer

August 12, 2006

U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton kicked off her Long Island fundraising tour Friday with an announcement about federal funding to save the shorelines and sidestepped whether she'd debate primary challenger Jonathan Tasini.

Tasini, a critic of Clinton's support for the Iraq invasion, has demanded five debates with her before the Sept. 12 primary. Clinton was noncommittal when pressed on the matter Friday.

NY Post

By Ryan Sager

August 21, 2006 -- JONATHAN Tasini has less than a month to become New York's Ned Lamont. The Democratic primary is on Sept. 12, he's at 13 percent in the polls and he's just had his best fund-raising week ever online.
However, as Primary Day approaches, the "netroots" have yet to make the Tasini campaign a cause célèbre, with all the money and press attention that doing so would mean. This, despite the fact that the centrist, Iraq-War-supporting Sen. Hillary Clinton, presumptive frontrunner for the '08 Democratic presidential nomination, should by all rights be a much juicier target for the "progressive" Left than the washed-up Joe Lieberman ever was or could hope to be.

NYTimes
Admiration, Thy Name Is Spitzer
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: August 22, 2006
Listening to the Democratic candidates for attorney general in their debate the other night was enough to make one wonder why Eliot Spitzer is running for a position as lowly as governor. To hear the four of them talk about Mr. Spitzer, who holds the job they all want, he might as well skip the preliminaries and shoot for canonization.

Sure, he has some flaws, the candidates allowed. But over all, they referred to Mr. Spitzer in reverential tones of the sort that the pope might expect from L’Osservatore Romano.

Editorial
Hillary Clinton's apparent determination to duck a debate with the Democratic challenger to her re-election, Jonathan Tasini, is so unbecoming of a woman who would be President that it has prompted both the New York Post and New York Times - which rarely agree editorially - to demand that one be held. Add us to that list.
Ms. Clinton is in absolutely no danger of losing the primary. Her aversion to debating Mr. Tasini has to do with the prime focus of his campaign: her vote four years ago to authorize President Bush to go to war with Iraq.
Our junior Senator would just as soon not remind voters, in a state where diverting our focus from smashing Al Qaeda and hunting down Osama bin Laden to invade another nation was questioned long before the national mood shifted against the war, that she was one of the President's enablers. For much of the primary campaign she has succeeded in dodging the issue, in no small measure due to Mr. Tasini's campaign being so woefully underfunded that he hasn't run TV commercials.