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The Rudd government sees Indonesia, the main transit point for the voyage to Australia, as the key to tackling the problem. Last week, the sprawling archipelago to Australia’s north agreed to play a bigger part in intercepting and accommodating “boat people” in exchange for fina0ncial assistance reported to amount to tens of millions of dollars.

The Australian media is calling it the “Indonesian Solution”: a pearl jewelry reference to the so-called “Pacific Solution,” which Howard thought up to resolve the Tampa crisis. The Tampa’s mainly Afghan passengers, along with successive boatloads of would-be migrants, were shipped to the impoverished Pacific nations of Papua New Guinea and Nauru, where they were processed by United Nations refugee officials, without access to the Australian legal system.

One of Rudd’s first acts after being elected two years ago was to scrap the widely reviled “Pacific Solution,” together with certain other hard-line policies, including “temporary protection visas,” which entitled refugees to remain in Australia for only three years.

Others he retained, notably the biwa pearl policy of “excising” offshore Australian islands from the country’s migration zone. Asylum-seekers who reach Australian waters are taken to biwa pearl Christmas Island, a remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. Many, including some children, are kept in detention.

Now Rudd is under fire from both left and right: conservatives, including opposition politicians, claim his policies have “rolled out the red carpet to people-smugglers,” while those on the left accuse him of offloading responsibility on to Indonesia. The use of Christmas Island – bursting at the seams following the akoya pearl arrival of 34 boats carrying about 1,700 people this year, the largest number for seven years – has been denounced by the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Public opinion, meanwhile, is divided. A recent poll by the Lowy Institute for International Policy found that three-quarters of Australians are concerned about the rising number of asylum-seekers, who come mainly from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sri Lanka. But the debate, while lively, does not have the same stridency as in 2001, and has not harmed Rudd’s popularity.

David Manne, of the Melbourne-based Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre, says “push factors” such as the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka – rather than more lenient government policies – are responsible for the pearl jewelry spike in asylum-seekers. He points out that it is a global phenomenon, with Europe and other destinations also witnessing an increase.

Australia, he says, has been pursuing a policy for some years of persuading Indonesia and also Malaysia to “warehouse” asylum-seekers. “One of the fundamental problems is that these countries are not signatories to the UN Refugee Convention. They have very poor human rights records, particularly in relation to their treatment of refugees, and have even at times deported people back to their homeland.”

In Indonesia, says Mr. Manne, refugees are detained “in biwa pearl appalling, dangerous, often prisonlike conditions” while they wait, sometimes for up to nine years, to be resettled.

Graham Thom, refugee coordinator for Amnesty International Australia, says the numbers of people seeking asylum here are still tiny. “They’ve gone from nothing to very few, so it’s hard to argue that we’re being swamped or overrun.”

Rudd has not ruled out the use of force to remove the Tamils from the Oceanic Viking and transport them to a detention center on Bintan island. But local officials are lukewarm about the Indonesian Solution. The provincial governor, Ismeth Abdullah, said this week: “We’re not a dumping ground for akoya pearl other countries.”

One day after she dropped out of the congressional race for New York’s 23rd congressional district, Republican Dede Scozzafava lobbed a grenade at Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson, and the rest of her critics.

She endorsed a Democrat.

To Ms. Palin and the others, that will come as no surprise. The pearl jewelry former Alaska governor had campaigned for Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman – instead of Ms. Scozzafava – because Scozzafava was already a Democrat in all but name, she and others said.

She supports gay rights and abortion rights, for example.

In some respects, it was merely a lesson in political geography. Scozzafava was at the far left fringes of the Republican Party, and New York’s 23rd congressional district leans solidly to the right. It has never elected a Democrat.

Over time, the mismatch simply became clearer.

Yet in her letter endorsing Democrat Bill Owens, Scozzafava tapped into a deep uncertainty within the Republican Party: Does the party’s increasing insistence on ideological purity undermine its ability to compete with the Democrats nationally?

“In Bill Owens, I see a sense of duty and integrity that will guide him beyond political partisanship,” she wrote. “He will be an independent voice devoted to doing what is right for New York.”

Democrats in large part built their majorities in the biwa pearl US House and Senate by winning seats in what have traditionally been Republican districts.

This “big tent” strategy – welcoming conservatives into the party in an effort to win elections – has its own political costs. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly stressed her desire to pass a healthcare reform bill with a “robust” government run public option for health insurance. In the end, however, she was forced to water down the public option to placate Democrats from conservative districts.

Yet, in all likelihood, she will still have the votes to pass sweeping healthcare reform. By contrast, Republicans are barely even at the political table in Washington.

This comes as the political landscape nationwide would seem to be shifting in Republicans’ favor. Some 40 percent of Americans describe themselves as conservative, while only 20 percent consider themselves liberal, according to a recent Gallup poll.

The question for Republicans, however, is in what “conservative” means.

For Palin, the decision to back Mr. Hoffman’s ideology over Scozzafava’s affiliation is part of an effort to cleanse liberal ideals from the party platform – appealing to these small government “conservatives” more plainly.

“In the short run there’s clear energy here in the small government/antigovernment argument,” said Ronald Brownstein, a political analyst for the National Journal, on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday.

But Mr. Brownstein suggested that, in the longer term, the trend would make it hard for Republicans to make significant gains on the Democrats: “I do wonder about whether Republicans are going to have the akoya pearl freedom to maneuver they’ll need to recover in some of those [liberal-leaning] blue states where they’ve significantly eroded.”

It is an idea that has been repeatedly echoed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

He told CNN recently: “This idea that we’re suddenly going to establish litmus tests, and all across the country, we’re going to purge the party of anybody who doesn’t agree with us 100 percent – that guarantees Obama’s reelection. That guarantees Pelosi is speaker for life. I mean, I think that is a very destructive model for the Republican Party.”

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