Washington Wrap

Dotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker, Beth Lester, Clothilde Ewing, Nathaniel Franks and Dan Furman of the CBS News Political Unit have the latest from the nation's capital.

* Politics Creeps Back into Reagan Memorial Week

* More Controversy in Florida Vote Count

* Moran Survives Virginia Primary

* Kerry's (Mostly) Personal Day in California

* South Carolina GOP Senate Runoff

Ronald Reagan Was Not a Flip-Flopper: The Boston Globe reports that the moratorium on politics this week to honor the memory of former President Reagan has been broken a bit. The Bush campaign now leads its Web site with a "living memorial" to President Regan and has sent out an e-mail to supporters directing them to the site.

And, in Georgia, President Bush's characterization of the former president had strong echoes of his own re-election theme. "Ronald Reagan will go down in history as a great American president because he had a core set of principles from which he would not deviate. He understood that a leader is a person who sets clear goals and makes decisions based upon principles that are etched in his soul."

Republicans told the Globe that it would be impossible to separate Reagan's death from the current presidential race, or to take politics out of his death and burial this week. "It's unavoidable," said Grover Norquist, conservative activist and Reagan champion.

Democrats also put a political cast on their comments and are praising Reagan for qualities they often say Bush lacks. Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle said on Tuesday that the spirit of bipartisan cooperation has turned sour in the decade since Reagan announced his affliction with Alzheimer's disease. He implicitly blamed Bush and the Republicans in control of the House and Senate for the changed atmosphere.

More Trouble in the Florida Election World: Ed Kast, the head of the state's Elections Division, resigned on Monday after feeling mounting political pressure over the state's purging of suspected felons from the voter rolls, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. In a very brief letter he wrote, "I find it necessary to tender my resignation."

Identifying legal voters as felons and purging them from the voter rolls was a major problem for the state of Florida in the 2000 election. Now, The New York Times reports some election county supervisors are worried that a new list of 48,000 possible felons might also be flawed and that certain state laws make it too easy to disqualify legal voters.

During the 2000 election, state officials sent each county a list of registered voters whom it thought were felons. Officials asked counties to verify the lists and, if they could not, remove questionable voters from the rolls.

The N.A.A.C.P. sued in 2001 and as part of an agreement Florida acquiesced to checking suspected felons more carefully before reporting them to county supervisors for removal from the voting rolls. In addition, under a new process enacted through the state's new election reform laws counties have to send certified letters to suspected felons and only then can the state remove them from the rolls if they do not promptly respond. However, this is still causing headaches for election supervisors. Some civil rights groups say that it is unfair to put the burden of proof on the voter. "We have to identify a proper procedure to ensure that anyone removed is actually a felon," said Sancho, the Leon County elections supervisor. He added that he has already found mistakes in his area.

The Saint Petersburg Times notes that Florida's 67 elections supervisors, who are at their annual conference, "are feeling the pressure of intense public scrutiny that increases as another closely fought presidential election draws near. The rest of the country seems convinced that Florida will screw it up again." Supervisors are still trying to develop additional safeguards to prevent that from happening. One plan circulating among them would require officials to verify convictions of felons and then make sure that their voting rights had not been restored. Only after this process would a letter be sent warning them they could be purged from voting rolls.

Besides outlining the purging procedure this new election reform law also keeps that list of felons secret. Civil rights groups, joined by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., have sued to gain access to the list.

Democrat Wins First Contested Primary of His Career: Incumbent Jim Moran won the Democratic nomination for Virginia's 8th District on Tuesday, defeating local lobbyist Andrew M. Rosenberg. Although he received 59 percent of the vote, Moran told reporters that his 18-point win over Rosenberg was disappointingly closey. Said Moran: "It's a good vote total, but from my point of view, it should have been 90 to 10," reports the Washington Post.

This was Moran's first contested primary since he joined Congress in 1990. Rosenberg said that he "was proud he had offered voters a Democratic alternative to Moran," but "It's obviously always difficult to run against an incumbent. ... There's no question that Congressman Moran has a strong and loyal base of support."

Moran fought controversy in the last two weeks of his campaign. His campaign manager, Alan Secrest, resigned in late May and has accused Moran of making anti-Semitic remarks in a meeting several months ago. Secrest has refused to reveal what he thinks Moran said. Nobody else in the meeting, including Howard Dean's former campaign manager, Joe Trippi, remembers hearing Moran say anything objectionable.

Ultimately, though, the controversy might have helped Moran. Although only 12 percent of the district's registered voters showed up to vote, many who did make it to the poll said they supported Moran because of the controversy. Said Bob Rackmales, 66, a retired Foreign Service officer from Alexandria, "I think [the Secrest allegation] is a phony issue. ... The hyping of it crystallized my decision to vote for Moran and erased any lingering doubts. I was not prepared to vote against someone on the basis of a totally ridiculous charge. ... I know Jim Moran is not an anti-Semite."

Moran will face Republican candidate, Lisa Marie Cheney, a distant relative of Vice President Dick Cheney, in the November election. He said first he is turing his attention to his wedding which will take place next week.

Kerry Does Los Angeles: It was a day of remarkable swings for the Kerry campaign. Sen. John Kerry began his day in Washington, traveling in the early hours to Los Angeles for his daughter Alexandra's graduation from film school. Upon touching down in the City of Angels, Kerry headed straight to Simi Valley, through decidedly less angel-like traffic, to the Reagan Presidential Library, where he paid his respects to the late president.
Kerry crossed himself lightly and pursed his lips as he entered the room where the 40th leader of the free world lay in repose.

From the Reagan library, Kerry transferred his somber day to the swank W Hotel. After checking in, Kerry told his aides that he desired a "quiet stroll" around the hotel, located in the uber-hip Westwood area.

But when you're a candidate for president, there is no such thing as a quiet stroll. Kerry's walk included eight Secret Service agents, eight pool press members, three staffers, one LAPD squad car, one unmarked car, two black Secret Service vehicles and sporadic LAPD motorcycles, all of which joined him for an hour-long, mostly uphill speed walk.

Kerry's walk produced some gawking from even star-savvy Los Angelenos. A woman in a black Jaguar asked for a autograph, a young man remarked to his partner, "We just walked by the next president of the United States," and another youngster told his mom via cell phone, "I just walked by John Kerry on my way to class."

As Kerry departed the area around the college campus of UCLA, a young woman gazed as she hoped, "Bye bye Kerry. Good luck. Please win."

Kerry then attended the screening of his daughter's film and had dinner at the Oasis restaurant with his daughters, first wife Julia Thorne, and actors Dana Delany and Daniel Stern, who plays the father in Ms. Kerry's film. Teresa Heinz Kerry left California earlier in the day to return to Pittsburgh where she has a friend who is hospitalized.

Kerry returns to the campaign trail next week. His fundraisers which were postponed from this week are back on the calendar. The California event featuring Barbra Streisand, Billy Crystal, Neil Diamond, Willie Nelson at Walt Disney Concert Hall will be on Thursday June 24. The New York funder at Radio City Music Hall will be on July 8.

Republican Runoff in South Carolina: Former South Carolina governor David Beasley and Rep. Jim Demint will face each other in a June 22 runoff to determine the Republican nominee to fill the seat of retiring Democratic Sen. Ernest Hollings.

Beasley received 37 percent of the vote and Demint received 26 percent in Tuesday's vote, reports the Washington Times. Millionaire real estate developer Thomas Ravenel just missed out on qualifying for the runoff after coming in 4,000 votes shy of Demint's total. Charlie Condon, the State Attorney General, ran a distant fourth. To avoid a runoff, one of the candidates needed to win 50 percent of the vote.

For most of the last 40 years, South Carolina has only had two men serve as senators: the late Strom Thurmond who served from 1956 until his retirement after the 2002 election, and Hollings, who has served since 1966.

The primary winner will face Democratic nominee, Inez Tenenbaum, South Carolina's State Superintendent of Education, in the November election.

Quote of the Day: "Well, there are stem cells to do research on, and we have to be really careful between what we want to do for science and what we should do ethically, and the stem cell issue is certainly one of those issues that we need to treat very carefully." --First lady Laura Bush telling CBS News' Bill Plante that she's not ready to back Nancy Reagan's endorsement of using embryonic stem cells for research on Alzheimer's Disease. (CBS News' "The Early Show")