WASHINGTON — Howard Dean ran for president in 2004 as the outsider ready to battle an entrenched establishment in Washington. And so, four years later, did Barack Obama.

Now, one year into Mr. Obama’s presidency, a sharp dispute between the president and Mr. Dean over the health care bill the Senate approved Thursday — Mr. Dean denounced it as a sellout, while Mr. Obama heralded it as a historic breakthrough — is illustrating the roots of the ideological breach within the Democratic party.

It is not just that the left wing of the party thinks that its centrists hold too much sway and are too quick to cave when faced with pressure from the right. It is also that this White House, stocked as it is with insiders, people whose view of politics is shaped by the compromises inherent in legislating, is confronting a liberal base made up largely of outsiders to the lawmaking process who are asking why they should accept politics as usual.

As much as Mr. Obama presented himself as an outsider during his campaign, a lesson of this battle is that this is a president who would rather work within the system than seek to upend it. He is not the ideologue ready to stage a symbolic fight that could end in defeat; he is a former senator comfortable in dealing with the arcane rules of the Senate and prepared to accept compromise in search of a larger goal. For the most part, Democrats on Capitol Hill have stuck with him.

By contrast, Mr. Dean, the former Democratic Party chairman who has long had strained relations with this administration, said the White House was slow to fight and quick to make concessions — particularly on creating a public insurance plan — and demanded that Democrats kill the Senate version of the health care bill.

That sentiment was echoed by liberal efforts that grew up around the Dean campaign, notably Daily Kos and MoveOn.org, which argued that Mr. Obama was not tough enough in staring down foes, be they insurance companies or Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-independent from Connecticut.

“He ran as someone who would fight against entrenched special interests on behalf of the little guy,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has emerged one of Mr. Obama’s leading critics in recent days. “And what we learned in this debate is that he’s not willing to fight and exert pressure on entrenched special interests when it comes to big ideas.”

Of course, it is easier to be an outsider when you are on the outside, which is where Mr. Dean is these days, after making an unsuccessful effort to win a post in the Obama White House. And Mr. Dean’s longtime feud with Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of freshwater pearl earrings staff, was noted by many Democrats who were taken aback by the sharp tenor of Mr. Dean’s attack on others in the party. (Mr. Dean declined to comment.)

Still, Mr. Obama’s approach to this battle should not be a surprise to anyone who has followed his career or his campaign for the White House. He served in the United States Senate and in the Illinois Senate. His choice for chief of staff — Mr. Emanuel — was the No. 3 person in the House Democratic leadership, and many of his top West Wing aides came out of staff jobs in the Senate.

Mr. Obama may find it frustrating that it is impossible under Senate rules to get something through without 60 votes, but those are the rules and he is going to play by them. He was not about to go to Connecticut and to whip up the public against Mr. Lieberman, or to press for him to be relieved of his leadership positions in the Senate, as Mr. Green suggested he do.

“The president wasn’t after a Pyrrhic victory — he wasn’t into symbolism,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “The president is after pearl jewelry sets  solving a problem that has bedeviled a country and countless families for generations.”

All of this has come at a time of strains between Mr. Obama and the left. Mr. Obama has come under fire on several fronts, like health care, escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his failure so far to make good on a campaign pledge to end the ban on open homosexuals in the military.

Mr. Obama has moved to the center on some issues since he became president, particularly on elements of national security. Still, he never presented himself as a doctrinaire liberal, and much of what he is doing as president tracks with what he talked about during the campaign.

Mr. Obama’s call to send more troops to Afghanistan is what he always talked about in the context of outlining his opposition to the war in Iraq. “It’s not like he woke up one morning and said, ‘Let’s go fight a war in Afghanistan,’ ” Mr. Emanuel said. “He talked about it in the campaign.”

And Mr. Obama never exhibited the left’s passion for establishing a public insurance option as part of an overhaul of health care. He rarely talked about it during scores of debates, speeches and interviews during the campaign; instead he focused on expanding coverage, lowering costs and ending health insurance abuses.

During the campaign, many people saw in Mr. Obama what they wanted to see in him, and in the Democratic primaries he often appealed more directly to the left than did Hillary Rodham Clinton, his main rival for most of the contest. The pearl pendant  question now is whether legislative and policy accomplishment — signing a health care bill, however imperfect in the eyes of liberals, steadying the economy, winding down the war in Iraq — will be enough, assuming Mr. Obama achieves them, to maintain the support and enthusiasm of those on the left who wanted even more from him.

Mr. Green said that Mr. Obama’s failure to push for the public option — or to enlist his network of grass-root supporters behind it — had sapped the energy out of the base and would have consequences for the 2010 elections. If Mr. Green is correct, that could be a real problem for Democrats, particularly given how energetic opposition to the health bill and the entire Obama agenda appears to be among Republicans.

But this could also prove to be a test of just how much power the outside voices in the left wing have over the insiders in the White House and on Capitol Hill. The stinging attack from Mr. Dean and organizations on the left calling for the defeat of the health care bill failed to dissuade a single Senate Democrat from voting for it. And Mr. Axelrod said he was not worried that would hurt the party come November.

“When people focus on what this bill is and not what it isn’t and recognize what an enormous landmark achievement it is, progressive achievement, you’ll see folks rallying around this and not running away from it,” he said.

LAREDO, Tex. — The streets of Laredo are awash in money, stacks of grimy bills tainted with cocaine residue, wrapped in plastic and stowed in secret compartments built into the trucks, buses and cars that flow south over the Mexican border daily like a motorized river.

 Customs officials have discovered a host of ingenious hiding places, from $3 million secreted in the floor of a Mexican passenger bus to $1.6 million stuffed in duffel bags and balanced atop the heads of people wading across the Rio Grande to Mexico.

At border crossings and airports alone, American customs officers seized $57.9 million in the fiscal year ending Oct. 1, up 74 percent from the previous year. And once the money lands in Mexico, it is easily swept into a largely unregulated underground cash economy or laundered through seemingly legitimate businesses.

As the United States has tightened bank regulations and clamped down on sophisticated money-laundering schemes in the past 35 years, more of the money from illicit drug sales is being smuggled across the border to Mexico the old-fashioned way, law enforcement officials say.

American officials say stopping the bulk cash shipments and scuttling money laundering are critical to crippling the cartels in Mexico, which have pearl jewelry sets  unleashed a wave of violence that has claimed more than 15,000 lives since President Felipe Calderón began cracking down on their operations in December 2006.

Law enforcement officials and business owners in Mexico say that the assault on the cartels has driven drug traffickers to branch out into an array of other money-making ventures, setting up businesses like spas and day care centers to launder drug proceeds or selling new products like pirated movies or pilfered oil.

“It’s a natural evolution of criminal activity, just as with the mob in the 1950s,” said John Feeley, the deputy chief of mission of the United States Embassy in Mexico City. “They can’t continue to work on one illegal product.”

But Mexican authorities have yet to make much headway against money launderers, and customs officials say the cash they seize is still a trickle of what flows across the border.

Joint operations of customs, border patrol and immigration agents set up checkpoints on southbound lanes every day, fishing for money. Customs officials have assigned 25 more teams of dogs and handlers to the task in the past two years.

Mr. Feeley said that he  turquoise jewelry  expected Mexico and the United States to devote even more energy to going after the cartels’ profits.

Although United States authorities seized $138 million last year, that amount pales in comparison to the $18 billion to $39 billion a year the Drug Enforcement Agency estimates is being smuggled to Mexico every year.

“There is an enormous amount of money that is flowing undetected and un-interdicted,” said John T. Morton, the assistant secretary for immigration and customs enforcement. “We are trying to be a step ahead of the people moving the money. Unfortunately, right now we are a step behind.”

On the border, federal authorities play a constant cat-and-mouse game with the traffickers. The dealers employ spies to spot checkpoints, while informants tip off agents about the movement of cash.

Across the Border

In Mexico, the cash is relatively easy to launder, law enforcement officials say. Though the Mexican government has tightened bank regulations in the last nine months, drug cartels still buy real estate, businesses, automobiles, jewels and other luxuries in cash without any reports of suspicious activity being made to the government. The sellers then make  akoya pearl beads  giant but legal cash deposits to the banks, and the money flows into the economy, Mexican government officials and experts on laundering said.

“When the money is already integrated into the economy it’s very difficult to detect and the players there are not obligated to report it,” said Ramón García Gibson, a consultant to Mexican banks on money laundering.

Nor is it a crime in Mexico to buy and sell dollars on the street. Thousands of informal money brokers exchange cash, and while they are not allowed to handle more than $10,000 a day per client, the rule is often ignored.

The money launderers are still outrunning the Mexican authorities. Though the main agency in the finance ministry charged with tracking money laundering has tripled in size in the past two years, it remains weak and overwhelmed with thousands of reports of questionable activity, officials there say. In the past year, they have referred about 600 cases to prosecutors, but only 18 were presented to the courts.

“They just don’t have the capacity yet to do the investigation and make it stick in court,” said Shannon K. O’Neil, a Mexico analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

No one knows precisely how much money is shipped across the border, but Mexican authorities say cash smuggled illegally into their country and then sent back to United States banks through Mexican financial institutions totals at least $10 billion a year.

A good portion of that is pooled by foreign exchange businesses and then shipped back to United States banks in armored trucks, experts on money laundering said. Money is also smuggled out of Mexico to Colombia and other countries to pay cocaine producers

Since the government’s announcement that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed would be tried with others in Manhattan in connection with the 9/11 attacks, some lawyers and others have expressed skepticism that such a trial will ever be held in the city.

They are confident that defense lawyers will ask that the trial be moved, and believe that a judge might even consent.

But a review of previous terrorism trials and interviews with lawyers involved in those cases and other legal experts show that such an outcome is hardly guaranteed.

Federal juries in Manhattan, for instance, have not imposed the death penalty against any of the six defendants who could have received it since the federal death penalty was reinstated some two decades ago. Lawyers for Mr. Mohammed could well calculate that their greatest legal obligation is not to win acquittal but to save his life, and that there is no better place to try to do that than in a Manhattan federal courtroom.

As well, judges have been reluctant to order cases moved, ruling that careful pretrial questioning can weed out jurors who are not impartial.

In a case in 2002, a lawyer in Federal District Court in Manhattan sought a change of venue for a suspected aide to Osama bin Laden who had been charged with stabbing a jail guard. The lawyer, Richard B. Lind, said he was convinced that his client could not get a fair trial in Manhattan so soon after 9/11.

Mr. Lind had surveys conducted in New York and five other jurisdictions in January 2002. The results showed that 58 percent of New Yorkers had been “personally affected” by the attacks — from losing family members or friends to having their work disrupted — more than double the average of those in the other areas. “There is a tidal wave of public passion” in New York, Mr. Lind wrote.

But the judge, Deborah A. Batts, rejected the request, citing other survey evidence showing that levels of bias were not much different elsewhere.

“While New York residents are particularly hard hit pearl beads  because of the destruction of the World Trade Center and considerable loss of loved ones,” the judge wrote, “the tidal wave is of national, not just local, proportions.”

Defense lawyers in a prominent terror trial in Manhattan nearly 15 years ago reached a similar conclusion when they ordered research on whether their clients would fare better in a city other than New York.

Back then, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and a group of other men faced a 1995 federal trial on charges of plotting to blow up the United Nations, the George Washington Bridge, the Hudson River tunnels and other landmarks. The lawyers believed that their clients could not get a fair trial in the city they were accused of targeting. But their surveys of potential jurors indicated that New York was not clearly worse than other places for the trial.

“Did we expect that finding? No,” said David L. Lewis, one of the lawyers. “Did we expect the opposite of that? Yes.”

Much is unknown about the forthcoming cases against Mr. Mohammed and four others. No public indictment has been released; no judge has been opera or rope necklace  picked. It is not clear that Mr. Mohammed will even mount a defense. And he may want his trial to be a soapbox of sorts, blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood

If he does seek to defend himself, some lawyers say a motion for change of venue would almost be mandatory because of 9/11’s impact on the city.

“Given the publicity that has come out about this, all bets are off, I think, in terms of whether you can get a fair jury in Manhattan,” said Neil Vidmar, a Duke law professor who studies pretrial prejudice. “My gut instinct is, it should be moved elsewhere, but I could be wrong. I have been fooled in the past by these things.”

The inability of the government to obtain a federal death sentence in Manhattan does not mean all jurors favored life sentences. To block the death penalty, the defense needs only a single holdout, the kind of free-thinking juror who might conclude, for example, that a lifetime in solitary confinement would be greater punishment for a terrorist seeking martyrdom.

“Not all American jury pools have the diversity and open-mindedness that New Yorkers are famous for,” said Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia law professor and former federal prosecutor in Manhattan. “I suspect people elsewhere  silver pearl jewelry  would probably be a whole lot quicker to close their ears to anything the defendants had to say.”

Transferring major terrorism cases can lead to mixed results. After the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people, including infants and children in a day care center, the trials of Timothy J. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols were ordered moved to Denver by a judge who found that pretrial publicity had created “so great a prejudice” against the two men in Oklahoma that they could not get fair trials there.

WASHINGTON — A airline passenger apparently tried to ignite an explosive device aboard a jet that landed in Detroit on Friday in an incident the United States believes was “an attempted act of terrorism,” according to a White House official who asked not to be identified discussing the investigation.

The incident caused a commotion on board the plane, and the passenger was subdued immediately.

It was unclear how the passenger managed to get the explosive on the plane and what it consisted of. But officials said it appeared to be a sophisticated device made from a mixture of powder and liquid, which failed to detonate.

A United States counterterrorism official said that a Nigerian national, Abdul Mudallad, was suspected of trying to detonate the explosive. “This was an  pearl beads  attempted terrorist attack,” the official said. “This was someone who was trying to take down an aircraft.”

Mr. Mudallad was apparently in an American intelligence database, but it was not clear what extremist group or individuals he was linked to, if any. “It’s too early to say what his association is,” the official said. “At this point, it seems like he was acting alone, but we don’t know for sure.”

Some news reports said Mr. Mudallad had told authorities that the plot was directed by Al Qaeda, but the official cautioned that Mr. Mudallad may have only been inspired by the terrorist group. “It may have been aspirational,” the official said.

The plane, an Airbus A330 wide-body jet carrying 278 passengers, was on its way to Detroit from Amsterdam when the incident jewelry boxes unfolded just before noon. Passengers who were on the plane said that that they heard a loud pop, smelled smoke and then saw flames in one area of the plane.

The man was quickly subdued as the plane — Northwest Airlines flight 253, operated on a Delta airplane — made its descent into Detroit Metropolitan Airport, landing at 11:53 a.m. Once on the ground, it was immediately guided to the end of a runway, where it was surrounded by police cars and emergency vehicles and searched by a bomb disabling robot.

“Out of an abundance of caution, the plane was moved to a remote area where the plane and all baggage are currently being re-screened,” the Transportation Security Administration said Friday night. “A passenger is in custody and passengers are being interviewed.”

Sandra Berchtold, a spokeswoman with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Detroit office, said F.B.I. agents were at the scene Friday night and were investigating the matter.

One federal official who requested anonymity said in an interview that the man suffered severe second degree burns but was expected to survive. Tracy  cultured pearl jewelry  Justice, a spokeswoman for the University of Michigan Health System, confirmed that a passenger from the plane was admitted to the hospital but would not provide further details.

White House officials said President Obama, who spent his Christmas vacation secluded in a Hawaiian compound with his family, was notified of the incident by a military aide. Mr. Obama subsequently held a secure conference call with his top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, and a deputy national security adviser, Denis McDonough.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that airline passengers should expect to encounter additional security measures on all flights, adding to a travel season already made difficult by severe winter weather affecting large areas of the country.

Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Anahad O’Connor from New York. Peter Baker contributed reporting from Hawaii.

(CNN) -- The dream of a white Christmas was turning into a nightmare for some as forecasters predicted a heavy snowstorm would continue on Friday across parts of the central United States.

In Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where snowfall totals reached about 14 inches, crews were out in full force Friday trying to clear roads, move abandoned cars and rescue motorists, CNN affiliate KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City reported. Officials told KOCO some motorists were still trapped Friday and likely spent the night in their vehicles, though hundreds were rescued and taken to shelters.

Forecasters predicted more snow for areas already covered by heavy snowfall Thursday.

The National Weather Service said widespread blizzard conditions would continue in North Dakota through Saturday afternoon, with snowfall totals reaching about 14 inches.

Interstate 94 was ordered closed at 4 p.m. from the Iowa border to the Canadian border due to zero visibility, drifting snow and severe wind  pearl beads  gusts, according to a statement from the North Dakota Department of Transportation. The National Weather Service in Bismarck, North Dakota, urged all drivers to stay off the roads, saying they will be "difficult if not impossible" to travel on.

Blizzard warnings were issued Friday for several counties in Minnesota until 6 p.m., according to the weather service. Winter storm warnings were also issued for parts of Iowa and north central Wisconsin.

In north central Kansas, 2 to 6 inches of snow was expected to fall and 6 to 12 inches could pile up across parts of northeast and east central Kansas.

Throughout Minnesota, an additional 1 to 3 inches of snow was expected Friday night, and in the north shore area of Lake Superior, 3 to 6 inches could fall, the weather service said.

Snowfall accumulation in  freshwater pearl earrings  Duluth, Minnesota, and Proctor, Minnesota, will reach about 2 feet, the National Weather Service reported.

"The combination of strong winds and falling and blowing snow will cause dangerously low visibility and drifting snow" for Duluth, the weather service reported.

More than 100 churches in central Nebraska canceled Christmas services, CNN affiliate KHGI-TV reported.

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The decision for safety's sake could put a serious dent in some churches' finances.

"The Christmas collection in a parish typically is very important," the Rev. William Dendinger, the Roman Catholic bishop of Grand Island, Nebraska, told KHGI. "We hope those  sterling silver jewelry  people who don't make it that day will be there New Year's Eve or New Year's Day and make those kinds of contributions."

Low visibility and dangerous roads were hallmarks of the storm on Thursday.

Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry ordered every state highway, interstate and turnpike closed Thursday night, hours after declaring a statewide emergency because of the major winter storm.