Politics 2002-03 Archives

Good to see that Ashcroft has recused himself and put a professional prosecutor at the head of the Valerie Plame leak investigation. I don't personally know Patrick Fitzgerald, the US Attorney for Chicago, but I know him by reputation and know people who know him; he's a career prosecutor who made his name with the first World Trade Center bombing cases (among other things, I believe he was the lead prosecutor on the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman); I'm sure he'll be thorough and dogged, but unlike outside prosecutors (i.e., Independent Counsels), he has other things to do and won't spin this into an endless investigation if more pressing matters need the resources. A good call.

I still maintain that the best way to handle politically charged investigations would be to create a separate department of an Inspector General. Such a department could be built around the current Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice, which has a perenially full caseload with corruption in state and local governments, contracting, police corruption, etc., and thus would not be like an Independent Counsel, tempted to blow one investigation out of proportion. But the head of the department could be someone less political than the Attorney General (whose role in law enforcement, Supreme Court litigation and sometimes judicial selection makes him or her an inevitably controversial figure) and selected specifically for the trait of bipartisan respect. Once selected and nominated, an IG would be nearly impossible to fire over a single investigation in the absence of obvious abuse. And you could also consolidate the civil IG offices of various executive departments, which can be prone to the same problems as IC offices, thus avoiding the usual trap of new departments that duplicate existing ones.

And pay for the savings by abolishing the Commerce Department. Everyone wins!

Another one you might have missed, that I noticed I never got around to blogging: in August, the D.C. Circuit rejected most of Bill and Hillary Clinton's request for reimbursement for their attorneys' fees incurred in the course of the Whitewater and related investigations (although President Clinton did not seek reimbursement for the Lewinsky investigation, as per his agreement with Robert Ray resolving the charges arising from that case). The Clintons argued that they were statutorily entitled to reimbursement on the theory that the fees "would not have been incurred but for the requirements of" the Independent Counsel statute (the Ethics in Goverment Act) -- i.e., that "1) if not for the Act, the case could have been disposed of at an early stage of the investigation; and 2) they were investigated under the Act where private citizens would not have been investigated."

These arguments, of course, echoed the defense of the Clintons from the beginning: nothing to see here, old news, we were cleared by Arkansas regulators, nobody but Ken Starr would have investigated this stuff, yada yada yada.

The key passage:

Two years before the appointment of Independent Counsel Starr, a criminal referral was submitted by the Resolution Trust Corporation to the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas alleging illegal activities involving Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association, and naming the McDougals as suspects and the Clintons as witnesses. When in early 1994 the Attorney General appointed Robert Fiske as regulatory independent counsel, she gave him broad authority to investigate the Clintons' relationship with, inter alia, Madison Guaranty and the Whitewater Development Corporation. And when we appointed Kenneth Starr as statutory independent counsel in the summer of 1994, at the request of the Attorney General we granted him investigatory authority almost identical to Fiske's. The IC's final report on the Whitewater matter states that "[t]he breadth of the criminality already uncovered by the Fiske investigation in part contributed to the length of time necessary for the statutory Independent Counsel to complete his work." See Robert W. Ray, Final Report of the Independent Counsel, In Re: Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association, Vol. I, 21 (2001). Taking all of the above into consideration, we harbor no doubt that in the absence of the independent counsel statute the allegations surrounding the Clintons, Madison Guaranty, and Whitewater would have been similarly investigated and prosecuted by the Department of Justice.

The Clintons nevertheless argue that the DOJ would have conducted a substantially lesser investigation than that of the IC. The facts would not appear to substantiate this argument. Another independent counsel, albeit regulatory, had been appointed to investigate the matter, and in the short period he was in office he conducted an extensive investigation spending several hundred thousand dollars.

Indeed.

From a friend, who asks: why is there so much overlap between (a) those Americans who criticize our foreign policy for being too "unilateral" and (b) those Americans who feel that American branches of world religions need to ignore, if necessary, criticisms from their overseas branches when pressing for changes in doctrine (e.g., relating to abortion, ordination of women, homosexuality, etc.)?

But then, "unilateral" means "in opposition to Continental Europe," whereas criticism from Third World Christians generally gets discounted; they apparently are supposed to be seen, not heard.

The Weekly Standard had an interesting and sympathetic profile of Dick Gephardt some weeks ago, including some good Dean-bashing. I tend to like Gephardt when I'm just reading about him - on paper, you can make him sound like Harry Truman - but every time I see the guy he's just so full to the brim with idiotic cliched soundbites that lack even a semblance of logic or coherent thought that I have to turn off the TV. He probably is a decent guy, but listening to him drives me up the wall. The problem is one that's endemic to many Democratic politicians (Howard Dean is actually a rare exception): he talks down to his audience like he's speaking to a bunch of grade school students.

Barring a catastrophe in the war on terror or a major economic reversal, I still can't see Gephardt going anywhere, or the Democrats winning in November, unless something happens that forces the candidates to change the subject from war and taxes. Dean is Bush's ideal matchup -- and the one the true believers on the Left want -- because they both want to run on war & taxes, and the two are diametrically opposed on both questions. Other than Gephard't's trade-war talk, none of the other Dems have been able to change that definition of the agenda. And as we know, he who sets the agenda usually wins.

One thing I've been kicking around is whether the cultural issues will matter. A friend suggested that culture issues are bigger now than they were in 1992, but I don't really buy it; if anything, the cultural fissures were more pronounced that election year. 1992 saw Buchanan's "culture war" speech - the battles of that era seem tame only because we've gone so much further down the slippery slope. 1992 was "the year of the woman." Dan Quayle v. Murphy Brown. It was 1992 that the Supreme Court upheld Roe v Wade (or, as Scalia pointed out, completely rewrote Roe under the guise of being bound by precedent). The LA riots were in April 1992. And, of course, Bill Clinton was one big walking cultural issue.

Culture is a big subtext, particularly if Dean wins. But the main topics will still be taxes and war.

This NY Times article on programs to keep African-American men enrolled in college has an interesting sidebar on the Times' site: the "Times News Tracker" says you would receive an email about the article if you had chosen one of the following four topics as one of your alerts:

Teachers and School Employees
Blacks
Equal Educational Opportunities
Education and Schools

Now, I'm really no expert on political correctness, so maybe this is just me, but isn't it considered bad form these days to use the term "Blacks" as opposed to "African-Americans" or, failing that, "black people"? Just has a ring of Strom Thurmond about it, as in, "I'd like to get the news about the Blacks."

For a little perspective on the Democratic primaries -- or, perhaps, perspective on how they've changed in 12 short years -- check out at least one national poll for the Democrats in December 1991 (source: Daily Kos), which in theory should be the same point in the process as we're at today:

Mario Cuomo - 33%

Jerry Brown - 15

Douglas Wilder - 9

Bob Kerrey - 8

Tom Harkin - 7

Bill Clinton - 6

Paul Tsongas - 4

Undecided/Others - 18

Of course, #1 never entered the race, which is much like the current polls would look if they were still listing Hillary! in every poll. It may be harder for anyone today to roar from the back of the pack this late in the game, especially where Howard Dean has already pulled the same trick.

Saddam Hussein, on the American GI: "Why didn't you fight?" one Governing Council member asked Hussein as their meeting ended. Hussein gestured toward the U.S. soldiers guarding him and asked his own question: "Would you fight them?"

A US official, on Saddam's capture: "We can now determine," he said, "if he is the mastermind of everything or not." The official elaborated: "Have we actually cut the head of the snake or is he just an idiot hiding in a hole?"

And two from last week:

Tom Maguire, on Howard Dean: "[W]ill centrists peer in confusion at their television screens and wonder, who is this little man yelling at me, and why is his face so red?"

Tom Burka, with a little humor: "Gore To Claim He Invented Dean, Says GOP"

(Read the whole thing; link via Plum Crazy)

Howard Dean's major foreign policy address on Monday was probably a mixed bag politically; while Dean's anti-war crusade was yet again upstaged by reality, he once again succeeded in framing the public debate as Dean vs. Bush, and in the primaries, that's what you need.

On the substance? Well, Dean argued that he wouldn't abandon the idea of pre-emption, but (1) would stage a preemptive attack only where an "imminent" threat existed and (2) doesn't think Iraq met that test. It's a politically clever tactic, since it wouldn't necessarily tie down his own freedom of action as President in another case as dramatically as if he rejected preemption entirely, although it does call into question his judgment and does indicate a return to pre-September 11 policy (i.e., Operation Desert Fox vs. Gulf War II as the logical response to Saddam). Of course, I disagree completely with Dean on this.

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Kevin Drum linked last Friday to a page on the White House site about India, the Bushes' cat. I, too, had been unaware that the Bush family had a cat, but more amusing is this tidbit:

Named for former Texas Ranger baseball player, Ruben Sierra, who was called "El Indio"

Just cracked me up that the President of the United States has a cat named after Ruben Sierra.

So I took this online quiz to see who I support for president (duh!), and here's what I got:

Your Results:

1. Your ideal theoretical candidate. (100%)
2. Bush, President George W. - Republican (81%)
3. Kerry, Senator John, MA - Democrat (51%)
4. Edwards, Senator John, NC - Democrat (48%)
5. Lieberman, Senator Joe, CT - Democrat (46%)
6. Gephardt, Rep. Dick, MO - Democrat (45%)
7. Libertarian Candidate (42%)
8. Kucinich, Rep. Dennis, OH - Democrat (35%)
9. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat (29%)
10. Clark, Retired General Wesley K., AR - Democrat (24%)
11. Phillips, Howard - Constitution (24%)
12. LaRouche, Lyndon H. Jr. - Democrat (17%)
13. Socialist Candidate (16%)
14. Green Party Candidate (14%)
15. Sharpton, Reverend Al - Democrat (14%)
16. Moseley-Braun, Former Senator Carol, IL - Democrat (9%)

(Link via Tung Yin)

No surprise at the top, although I'd have thought it was closer to 90%. Can it really be that I agree with John Kerry more often than not? I mean, I know Kerry's been all over the map on a number of issues, but I've been listening to Kerry for years (particularly when I was in school in Massachusetts for seven years), and I can't ever remember him saying anything I agreed with, whereas I can think of several issues on which I've agreed with Lieberman, from war to capital gains tax cuts. It's also interesting to note that for all his "electability" talk, Clark is even further away from my side of the political spectrum than Dean is, which I take as a sign that unlike Dean, Clark hasn't been thinking seriously about politics long enough to dissent from his party's line on anything.

Atrios and a bunch of other far-out Lefty bloggers accuse John Kerry of "the Willie Horton campaign tactic of linking Howard Dean to Osama Bin Laden" for an ad (follow the link) that does nothing but show bin Laden's picture while (1) stating that America has evil enemies who plot against it (incontestibly true, no?) and (2) questioning Dean's inexperience in foreign affairs (a legitimate issue in any campaign, if a sometimes overstated one).

This is batty. Nothing in the ad accuses Dean of being soft on Al Qaeda, or even mentions any of Dean's policies. This is awfully tame stuff, in fact. By arguing that you shouldn't be able to raise the issue of whether a presidential candidate is equipped to deal with international terrorists like bin Laden, isn't Atrios effectively arguing for taking the issue of terrorism off the table entirely? Leaving aside the tactical insanity here -- the prison furlough issue worked precisely because the Democrats had spent years arguing that crime was a subject beneath discussion -- how can anyone believe that a candidate's ability to deal with the leading national security issue of the day shouldn't be an issue?

Or are Atrios and friends just saying that you can say that argument, but you can't dramatize it by referring directly to bin Laden?

Watching the Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, Graham and Mosely-Braun campaigns dissolve in various levels of disarray and ignominy, I'm reminded yet again: Senators are the presidential primary equivalents of the guys in red shirts on Star Trek. You know how, when they'd beam Kirk, Spock, McCoy and two unnamed guys in red shirts down to a planet -- you could always tell which ones were there just to get frozen in mid-air or fed to brain-eating plants or whatever. Somebody has to bite the dust to show what peril the named characters were in.

Consider the campaigns by US Senators since the early 70s or so (many of whom flirted with running more than once): besides the five named above, we've got McCain (2000), Hart (1984, 1988), Glenn (1984), Bradley (2000), Dole (1980, 1988, 1996), Muskie (1972), McGovern (1972, 1976, 1984), Gore (1988), Tsongas (1992), Harkin (1992), Kerrey (1992), Hollings (1984), Hatch (2000), Bob Smith (2000), Cranston (1984), Simon (1988), Kennedy (1980), Gramm (1996), Lugar (1996), Biden (1988), Howard Baker (1980), Birch Bayh (1976), Byrd (yes, Robert Byrd ran in 1976), Bentsen (1976), Scoop Jackson (1976), Church (1976), . . . and I'm probably missing a few. Add in sitting or former Senators who'd also been Vice President and you can toss in Quayle (2000) and Humphrey (1972 and 1976).

Lotta red shirts. We'd better be more careful here, Bones.

Way back some years ago -- all right, in August of 2002 -- Lileks predicted that

Once vulgar words are commonplace in the papers and the television, there’s no going back - and public life just gets cruder and cruder. I know it’s a losing battle. Fifty years down the road a presidential candidate will say “My opponent says I’m soft on the military, and to him and all his advisors, I can honestly say: f**k you.” He’ll be celebrated in some corners for connecting with the genuine people, with those not bound by musty conventions. The authentic people! The ones who really f**kin’ live!

(Expletives deleted). As with most dire predictions about society going to Hell in a handbasket, this one was inaccurate only because he overestimated how long it would take us to land at the bottom of that slippery slope; we're there now.

I'm sure by now you've seen the "Turkeygate" story (see here for the essentials of the story, and see here for some perspective from someone who was there), but this post from Democrats.org . . . well, the P.S. just says it all about the depth of the obsessions of the president's critics, doesn't it?

You can tell that Michael Isikoff is going hard on Howard Dean when he leads with this photo:

The underlying story - Dean's decision to keep his records as Vermont governor sealed - isn't something I get hugely exercised over, but Dean won't be able to hold the line on this if he gets the nomination (just ask any candidate who's ever tried to avoid releasing his tax returns; Bill Simon comes prominently to mind). It's also another example of how Dean's own record and biography contains so many of the things liberals love to attack Bush over (in this case, secrecy).

I had the same general reaction to stories about Dean's draft record; it may be fun for his critics to call Dean a "Draft Dodger" or get quotes where even his own mother admits of his medical deferment for a bad back -- that didn't keep him from skiing or working at odd jobs like pouring concrete -- "Yeah, that looks bad." Again, if Dean is the nominee, his vulnerabilities on this point may help immunize Bush against (idiotic) attacks on Bush's military service record, but the fact is that the military has some physical specifications for soldiers that are different from other demands of everyday life. Don't forget that in the 1950s, when Mickey Mantle was the best athlete on earth, he failed his draft physical due to bad knees. Just because Mickey could hit a ball a mile, run 90 feet like the wind and show up ready to play everyday no matter what he'd been out doing the night before didn't mean he had the stamina to march 5 miles with a heavy pack on his back, and so he didn't have to serve.

Peter Beinart (in a column that's now web-accessible only to subscribers of The New Republic) suggested some weeks back that, given the GOP's skepticism about nation-building during the Clinton years and the hesitance of some Republicans to support the Clinton Administration's policy on the war in Kosovo, one might assume that if the Democrats still held the White House, the Republicans would be playing the same role of petulant anti-warriors currently filled by the Democrats. Beinart's a reasonable enough guy, and he understands national security issues well, but he clearly doesn't understand much about Republicans if he thinks we would have been calling for a President Gore to restrain his response after September 11. Did Republicans castigate Harry Truman for being too much of a hard-line anti-Communist? I think it far more likely that if Gore were in the White House on September 11, Republicans would have been calling for a much more belligerent response, full of Old Testament-style smiting and wrath.

Kevin Drum, October 19, 2003:

[I]t has become obvious since he took office that, far from being a "uniter not a divider," George Bush is in fact (a) radically conservative and (b) does everything he can to hide the fact.

Kevin Drum, November 25, 2003:

I think that both liberals and conservatives have made the mistake of convincing themselves that Bush is a hard right ideologue . . . But if you look a bit more closely you'll see that he's not.

Speaking of strange news articles, this item from last Wednesday on Albany's reaction to the Massachusetts decision contains this head-scratcher:

In New York, which has a strong leader form of government, it is almost unheard of for legislation to be approved in the Senate without the majority leader’s backing or in the Assembly without the support of the speaker.

(Emphasis added). Now, I suppose the meaning is clear enough -- the state legislature is run by the leaders -- but this conjured up images of downtrodden New Yorkers walking to work under the shadow of massive graven images of George Pataki.

Instapundit linked on Thursday to an article about a handful of AARP members burning their membership cards to protest the group's support for the Republican-backed Medicare prescription drug bill, which contains some tepid reform provisions but is objectionable to the Left mostly because it's supported by President Bush and might help him get re-elected.

Now, if you read his blog, you know that Josh Marshall is perennially outraged -- shocked, shocked -- about what he calls "Astroturf" -- events designed by professional political activists and calculated to look like genuine grass-roots uprisings. Now, my first instinct was that the AARP protest by 'ordinary senior citizens' -- coming on the very day that Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton were tearing into the AARP in a coordinated attack -- smelled to me an awful lot like the same thing. Turns out, in fact, that MSNBC reported that "[t]he protest was organized by two liberal advocacy groups." Hmmmm.

Anyway, I checked Marshall's blog just to see if he was suitably shocked, but assuming (given the increasingly partisan tone of his writings lately) that he would just be silent on the issue, and be shocked and outraged only when he sees such tactics used by Republicans. Ah, how naive I was. On Thursday -- the very day of the Democrats' publicity offensive -- Talking Points Memo had this item:

Money talks, and AARP walks.

To find out more about the ugly truth and what you can do to make your voice heard, go to this page at the Campaign for America's Future website.

The page being one that carries a picture of an AARP member burning his membership card, under a blaring headline Attention AARP members, and directs AARP members to take the following actions:

:: Organize your own protests in your community.
:: Email Bill Novelli and tell him what you think.
:: Go to AARP website and give them a piece of your mind: http://community.aarp.org/rp-health/start
:: Go to www.oufuture.org for more infomation and action ideas.
:: Go to www.retiredamericans.org/ for a retiree organization that stands up for seniors.

It's Josh Marshall's turf. Don't you try to play on it.

Wesley Clark is drawing some fire from his fans on the left for his support for amending the constitution to prohibit flag-burning. Personally, I'm all in favor of keeping flag burning legal. Why stop the enemy from identifying himself? Every time some nitwit college student burns a flag on camera, that's one less idiot who can ever run for public office.

I've tried to follow the whole prescription drug bill story, honest, but it can be hard to keep score of which way the bill is going. This has to be good news, though: Nancy Pelosi, Tom Daschle and Ted Kennedy are vowing to defeat the bill. Assuming they're doing this out of something other than mere partisan pique, this means that (1) the private choice provisions are not just window dressing, but are substantial enough to worry Ted Kennedy, and (2) if they succeed in stopping the bill, Democrats will get the blame for scuttling a popular but expensive and imprudent new entitlement. Win-win!

Seriously, the more interesting tidbit here is this:

In her remarks at the rally, Pelosi also took a swipe at the AARP and its leader, William D. Novelli. The seniors organization endorsed the bill this week and is advertising on television to help secure its passage.

The Californian noted that Novelli wrote the preface to Gingrich's recent book on health care, and she said, "AARP's leadership has been in the pocket not only of the Republican leadership in the House, but they helped write Newt Gingrich's book on how to destroy Medicare."

Now, the AARP is one of Washington's most powerful lobbies, and like the NRA, its power comes not from money or organization but from the simple fact that millions of its members take the organization's guidance seriously in deciding how to vote. And the AARP has led the charge in some past Democratic campaigns to scare the old folks (think back to 1982 or to the catastrophic health insurance debacle). The idea that the organization may be on the GOP's side has to warm the heart of any Republican partisan.

Borowitz Report has the scoop.

I'm overdue to update my seat-by-seat rundowns of the Senate races from last November. One thing that's changed is that rumors of John McCain's retirement haven't panned out, and McCain seems likely to cruise to re-election now that Congressman Jeff Flake has dropped a potential primary challenge. Moreover, as to desultory rumors of McCain challenging Bush in 2004, "McCain . . . answered the question of what he's going to be doing in 2004 pretty decisively when he signed on as co-chair of President Bush's re-election campaign in Arizona. "

Then there's Louisiana, a Democratic lock if moderate John Breaux runs for re-election but another major potential GOP pickup in the South if he doesn't (notwithstanding the Louisiana Democrats' last-minute survival in the 2002 and 2003 elections). Breaux is still mulling whether he wants to spend at least the next four years in the minority, but he's promised to serve out his term rather than let new Democratic governor Kathleen Blanco appoint a successor. The GOP would presumably like to run Bobby Jindal, who ran a respectable race for governor and whose biggest liability may be his youth, but another thought occurs to me: isn't Tommy Thompson leaving office at HHS next year? Maybe Bush will appoint Jindal to succeed him. He's almost certainly the most qualified guy for the job.

Tom Maguire pointed me to this devastating New Yorker profile of Wesley Clark and his Kosovo record. There were a few interesting tidbits in the first half of the piece, which generally paints Clark as an admirable guy: I didn't know that was ethnically Jewish (his stepfather changed his name from Kanne) and had converted to Catholicism (combined with being raised a Southern Baptist, this gives him a real smorgasbord of religious background), or that Clark had first met Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld when he was detailed to the Ford White House. The account of the Kosovo campaign also includes some amusing tidbits:

When [Madeliene] Albright flew to Rambouillet [the site in France where negotiations were held between Milosevic and Albanian Kosovar leaders] in the hope that her presence might help to move things along, the Albanian delegation, working late at night, mistook her for a cleaning woman and told her to go away.

To which I ask: wasn't she traveling with security? The article also strongly suggests that Clark basically ran US policy in the Balkans without supervision while Clinton was distracted by impeachment, which of course reflects badly on Clinton moreso than on Clark.

Anyway, the real importance here is the damning picture painted of Clark's failings as a general:

*Clark in Kosovo did exactly what the Democrats accused Bush and Rumsfeld of: he projected a best-case scenario and went to war without a plan B:

[Prior to negotiations,] Clark had assured the White House that Milosevic would acquiesce, but the Serbian leader did not, and the talks ended in March.

“If you look back at the basics of it,” one Clinton Defense Department official recalls, “Wes’s strongly held view was ‘If we just threaten to bomb, he’ll fold, I know this guy. This won’t last forty-eight hours.’” . . .

President Clinton had publicly ruled out sending ground troops into the Balkans . . . More than once, [Air Force General Michael Short] came close to quitting his command in frustration. Short had complained to Clark about the lack of targets, but Clark assured him, “This will be over in three nights.”

NATO was unprepared for even this restricted version of war. There were no American aircraft carriers nearby when the war began, and only a third of the aircraft that would eventually be required. Milosevic had positioned his forces on the Kosovo border, and when the bombing commenced they swept into the province and dispersed, thus avoiding the long-distance strikes of the nato bombers. As the Serbs moved in, the Albanian Kosovars moved out, nearly emptying the country in an exodus to the hills, and subsequently posing a humanitarian crisis in the neighboring states of Albania and Macedonia.

When Milosevic refused to fold after just a few days of bombing, the NATO bombers quickly ran out of approved targets, and were failing to destroy, or even to seriously erode, the Serb force inside Kosovo. . .

Thus, not only did Clark rely too heavily on an over-optimistic assessment of the chances of a swift victory; he was also wrong.

*Clark was massively insubordinate, constantly looking to work around direct orders by appealing up the chain of command. I know they do this constantly in the movies, but this can't be a good thing in the real Army, and I suspect it's what Gen. Hugh Shelton meant about Clark's "integrity" issues. Consider the vignette where Clark has dinner with Tony Blair to sell him on a ground invasion that the Clinton Administration has already publicly and privately vetoed: a uniformed officer lobbying a foreign head of state to change his own country's policy?

*The Pentagon had to leak Clark's firing to the papers to stop him from appealing outside the chain of command yet again.

*Or consider this horrifying assessment of Clark's plans for a ground invasion:

Clark continued to focus on preparations for a ground war, and the plan he ultimately proposed was greeted in Washington with astonishment. "Gallipoli springs to mind," one defense expert, who made a study of Clark's plan, says. Clark advocated an invasion of Kosovo with a force of two hundred thousand troops, mostly American. The force would move into Kosovo through Albania, because Macedonia had declared that it would not allow its territory to be used for launching an attack. Aside from the most obvious difficulty with Clark's plan-that a major American-led ground invasion in the Balkans could not win the support of Congress, the Pentagon, the White House, or nato-there was a real problem regarding Albania. The country was already in chaos, and had almost no infrastructure. There was only one major road, and it was only partly paved, and there were few bridges that could support the mammoth tanks and fighting vehicles of the American Army. . . Clark outlined the plan to the Joint Chiefs in a video-teleconference, and they were starkly unsupportive. Dennis Reimer, the Army Chief of Staff, made it clear that he considered Clark's plan ludicrous. General Shelton refused to go forward with any real planning for the invasion. A Clinton Defense official recalls, 'Any of those elements of his most expansive plan would have, in our view and in the view of a number of thinking people, derailed what was a fairly fragile situation. And, in the judgment of many, many military professionals, it wouldn't have worked anyway. It called into question the real military judgment being put behind it.'

Fred Kaplan, the resident military analyst in Slate's stable of left-leaning pundits, tries gamely to defend Clark. Kaplan argues that the piece gives only the views of Clark's (numerous) critics in the military, but of course the sheer number of senior officials with an axe to grind against Clark has to be taken seriously when you consider that his long military career is virtually his only credential for public office. Kaplan thinks the New Yorker unfairly attacks Clark for being pig-headedly "certain[] about the rightness of his views," but then that's also a common complaint by the Clarkniks about Bush&Co.; if Clark's the same way, why should we expect the promised new and improved diplomacy and tact we've been promised?

Kaplan does convince me that the New Yorker piece misrepresents Clark's influence on Clinton Administration policy -- but as I noted above, that implication isn't as damaging to Clark as to his bosses anyway. Kaplan argues that the war on Kosovo was a good idea anyway -- but for a campaign that has argued relentlessly that the problem was how Bush got us into the Iraq war, the "how" of Kosovo is certainly a relevant question.

The bottom line here, and one Kaplan admits to, is that the New Yorker piece shows Clark as a guy who showed poor judgment in assessing an adversary he loudly proclaimed to know and understand:

Clearly, Clark made mistakes. Like many, he thought that merely threatening Milosevic with airstrikes would make him back down; after that didn't work, he thought three nights of bombing would crack his resistance. (The bombing campaign lasted 11 weeks.) But Clark was far from alone in this miscalculation; Clinton and Albright shared it.

Bad, but no worse than Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright. Some defense.

Very disappointing to see that Bobby Jindal has lost his bid for governor of Louisiana after recent polls seemed to show him pulling ahead; Jindal, a 32-year-old health care policy wunderkind and an Indian-American, seems like a rising star in the GOP, and would have been a wonderful asset. As with last year's narrow victory for Mary Landrieu, high turnout by the Democratic base for a Saturday election following a series of big national Republican wins seems to have been a factor.

So, let's review the past week or so of news for the Democrats:

*Howard Dean couldn't stick to his guns (so to speak) and issued a groveling apology for having said that he wanted guys with Confederate flags in the backs of their pickup trucks to vote for him (but not before issuing a James G. Blaine-style declaration that "We’ve got to stop having our elections in the South based on race, guns, God and gays").

*Terry "Florida Forever" McAuliffe is under fire yet again as the 2003 gubernatorial fiascos in California, Mississippi and Kentucky (with Louisiana possibly to follow) lead to the usual ritual denunciations:

Giving up on the South and taking African-Americans for granted: “Terry McAuliffe is out there on his own agenda, which does not involve the South,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the only black member of his state’s congressional delegation. “It does not involve African Americans to the extent that they need to be."

Putting Beltway-based consultants first and ignoring local issues: A [Democratic Governors Association] spokeswoman said it had been hard raising money to channel into state races. “This is a federally focused town,” the DGA’s Nicole Harburger said.

Fighting to the death for appalling incumbents rather than knowing when to police their own ranks: Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) said Democrats in Washington had complicated congressional Democrats’ efforts to hold on to the governorship. National party figures had impeded efforts to rally around Davis and, at the same time, come up with a viable alternative, she said. . . . “We were fought publicly, privately, by Democrats, by Davis’s people, of course, donors, party people, people who believe they are the major structure of the Democratic Party,” Sanchez said. She added that national party leaders had been “dismissive” of California’s 33-member Democratic delegation.

*Kevin Drum noted that the Democrats, mirroring their obessessive preference for all things European and their lingering grudge against the Electoral College, have established a primary system where nearly all the primaries distribute delegates proportionally, rather than winner-take-all, a system that seems likely to make it difficult to winnow the field and settle conclusively on a front-runner.

*Al Sharpton, of all people, breaks ranks to demand a floor vote on the likely-to-be filibustered nomimation of Janice Rogers Brown to the DC Circuit;

*Wesley Clark, who's reminding me more and more of of Jerry Brown every day, even down to the black turtlenecks ("touch my monkey!"), calls for Paul Bremer to be replaced by - well, really anybody, as long as it's not another one of those horrid Americans, and adds the following (note that, in fairness, this is a paraphrase):

"To crimp the flow of terrorists into [Iraq], he said the United States should find ways to work with Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia and make safeguarding the borders the highest priority."

So much for the idea that Coalition Man was going to follow Bob Graham's calls to get tough with the Saudis.

A tough week for the Dems. Is there anybody left to offend?

Expect light blogging the rest of the week, as I'm swamped at work. But before the polls open, I wanted to get my two cents in: I intend to vote "no" on Question 3 on the New York City ballot tomorrow morning. Question 3 proposes to change the city's mayoral and city council primary system to eliminate party primaries and have runoff elections among the top two candidates from an open field -- sort of like having the California recall every two years, with a touch of the Chirac/Le Pen race thrown in for good measure.

Seriously, I'm completely opposed to this, and not just because a partisan primary may have saved my life two years ago. As I explained at much greater length in this post, I'm a big believer in the value of political parties in promoting accountability, and specifically in the two-party system's ability to sharpen the two sides of major issues and present them within a mainstream framework.

I'm in, well, odd company here; a quick Google search turns up such diverse opponents of the plan as The New York Post, The New York Times, The Nation, and the United Federation of Teachers.

No on 3.

UPDATE: Jane Galt explains why she's voting Yes.

Turns out that one prominent filibusterer of Bush-appointed judges may be willing to make a deal to get a judgeship for his cousin's wife.

This whole business of Al Sharpton accusing Howard Dean of having an "anti-black agenda" is just endlessly amusing on many levels, but also revealing. The charge itself is bogus, of course; Sharpton picks two facially race-neutral issues that have killed the national Democrats in the past (guns and the death penalty), and lumps them in with Dean's 1995 statement (apostasy!) that "I think we ought to look at affirmative action programs based not on race but on class," which of course Dean instantaneously disavowed and promised to have no other gods but race-based affirmative action, thus forestalling the inevitable plagues of frogs, locusts and boils.

First of all, this is a big moment for Dean: you haven't really arrived in American politics until you've been called a racist by Al Sharpton.

Second, it is almost certainly not a coincidence that this comes immediately on the heels of Dean gaining the endorsement of Rev. Jesse Jackson, and I suspect it has a lot more to do with Jackson than it does with Dean. [UPDATE: My bad. It was an endorsement by Jackson's son, who's a Congressman. The larger point remains valid, since Sharpton timed his attack to coincide with the first significant African-American support for Dean]

Third, it's pathetic that Dean won't respond in kind. I know the front-runner needs to look above it all; and I know that most Democrats figure they will look like racist bullies if they go out of their way to make an issue of Sharpton and his long record of hate-filled ranting and dishonesty. But Sharpton took a swing at the king in the bluntest terms possible, and was disingenuous in doing so; surely if he's ever going to be fair game, it's now. This should be every Democrat's dream: a chance to denounce Sharpton and everything he stands for in a context where you won't get blowback for being "divisive" as you would if you went out of your way to go after him. Instead, Dean runs scared. If Dean doesn't have the cojones to criticize Al Frickin' Sharpton, the man's got no business running for president.

Fourth, notice how all of Dean's statements giving a little ground to the Right -- on affirmative action, Medicare, etc. -- are from about 1995, right after the Gingrich sweep of Congress. That says something too: Dean smelled which way the wind was blowing in 1995, and floated some trial balloons to see if he could position himself as a moderate. One wonders if he was thinking nationally already at that point, or just worried about keeping his job in changing times. Either way, he's clearly decided to set a different course since then.

It still amazes me that Tom Daschle and other Democrats have seriously considered holding up the (unfortunately) popular prescription drug entitlement in protest over a "means testing" proposal that would deny federal handouts to the Hated Rich. (Link via Kaus). Is there a worse combination of bad policy and dumb politics? I mean, the only justification here is the Dems' "if we let somebody out eventually everyone will leave" theory (see also school choice, Social Security, etc.), but that's a hard argument to get people to swallow.

UPDATE: Lileks has a slogan for those who want to link this type of thing to cost savings from not spending $87 billion to rebuild Iraq: Insurance for those who can already afford it, and screw the needs of our conquered nations!

I noticed last week that The New Republic's website was running banner ads in its righthand column for "Shattered Glass," the new movie about Stephen Glass, the reporter who used TNR's pages to perpetrate a journalistic fraud as notorious, in its day, as Jayson Blair's. Presumably -- unless I'm missing something -- those ads were paid for by the studio. I know it's been years now -- Glass is gone and his editor, Michael Kelly, is dead -- but shouldn't TNR be ashamed to get advertising revenue from a fraud on its readers?

(Blair's fraud, by the way, has now inspired episodes this season of at least two of the "Law & Order" serieses - dramatic overkill, anyone? Doesn't Dick Wolf have the power to let one L&O know from which headlines the other is ripping?)

UPDATE: Howard Kurtz noticed the same thing but doesn't seem to think it's an issue if TNR isn't embarrassed by references to the scandal.

Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias mull the helplessness of the Right in Britain and Canada, the feelbleness of the Left in Israel, and the pitiful condition of Britain's Left in the 1980s, but don't seem to understand why this happens to opposition parties in parliamentary states. In fact, American liberal commentators generally don't seem too interested in exploring why it is that politics in parliamentary systems is different from politics here in the U.S.; but in fact, the differences are fundamental and go a long way to showing the superiority of the American system, as well as the ways in which our own system could be improved upon:

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Former CIA operative Reuel Marc Gerecht writes in The Weekly Standard about Valerie Plame and what CIA cover stories are really about, and characterizes the charges of Bush Administration critics who have jumped on the story as "wildly overstated":

Cover is the Achilles' heel of the Operations Directorate. If you have a basic understanding of CIA cover, you can figure out why the over-the-top charges against the Bush administration in the Wilson matter make no sense. . . .

The key fact about CIA cover is that the vast majority of all case officers overseas "operate"--try to spot, develop, recruit, and run foreign agents--with little or none of it. . . .

The Bush administration's critics in the Wilson affair should be commended for worrying about the possible "blowback" on foreign contacts when operatives like Valerie Plame are exposed. The odds that any of her contacts are suffering, however, are small: Casual, even constant, open association with CIA officers isn't necessarily damning even in countries that look dimly upon unauthorized CIA operational activity within their borders. . . .

And if Plame, as has been suggested, was overseas as a non-official cover officer, known in the trade as a NOC, her associations are even less at risk, since foreigners have vastly more plausible deniability with NOCs, who are not as easy to identify as officially covered officers. It is important to note that if Plame was ever a NOC, her associations overseas were jeopardized long ago by the Agency's decision to allow her to come "inside"--that is, become a headquarters-based officer . . .

This officially sanctioned "outing" of NOCs is a longstanding problem in the CIA, where non-official cover officers regularly tire of their "outsider" existence ("inside" officers dominate the Directorate of Operations). It is not uncommon to find former NOCs serving inside CIA stations and bases in geographic regions where they once served non-officially, which of course immediately destroys the cover legend they used as a NOC. Foreign counterintelligence services naturally assume once a spook always a spook. Since foreign counterespionage organizations often share information about the CIA, this outside-inside transformation of NOCs can readily become known beyond one country's borders.

Whether or not Valerie Plame was engaged in serious work inside the Agency's Non-Proliferation Center, one has to ask what in the world her bosses were doing in allowing her husband, a public figure, to accept a non-secret assignment which potentially had a public profile? Journalists regularly learn the names of clandestine-service officers. Senior agency officials may well have thought very little of Ambassador Wilson's "yellowcake" mission to Niger, which explains CIA director George Tenet's statement about his ignorance of it. They may have thought Wilson an ideal candidate for this low-priority, fact-finding mission. But neither is an excuse for employing a spouse of an undercover employee if senior CIA officials thought Plame's clandestine work was valuable. The head of the Non-Proliferation Center ought to be fired for such sloppiness.

Read the whole thing.

The real truth about leaks!

(The site I'm linking to, by the way, is playing pretty fast and loose with their domain name).

Eugene Volokh complains that he got the following non-response from ESPN.com to his email about Gregg Easterbrook's firing:

From: ESPN Support
To: volokh@mail.law.ucla.edu
Subject: Re: Other

Hi Eugene,

Thank you for contacting us.

We appreciate your interest, but that is currently not a feature on ESPN.com.

Regards,

Patty
ESPN.com
http://espn.go.com/

He then notes that other readers got the response I got:

Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 08:54:13 -0700
To:
Subject: Re: NFL
From: ESPN Support

Hi,

Thank you for contacting us.

We appreciate your comments and are considering your opinion. We will
forward your comments along to the appropriate department for review.

Regards,

Jesse
ESPN.com
http://espn.go.com/

It appears that Volokh's problem was that he selected"Other" rather than "NFL" in the drop-down subject menu on ESPN's contact page.

Meanwhile, Ralph Wiley throws out the ceremonial first race card in ESPN.com's post-Limbaugh/post-Easterbrook era:

Dub's theory on baseball curses is that everybody sort of avoids what he calls the truth about them; teams that were -- or are -- historically dismissive and smugly cruel about its black folks -- those are the teams that stay cursed. . . . Maybe one day the Cubs and the Red Sox will get out of historical denial, ante up and kick in, pay off whatever their psychic debt is, and move on.

Um, a little history? Since the breaking of the color barrier, six all-white teams have won the World Series:

1947 Yankees
1949 Yankees
1950 Yankees
1951 Yankees
1952 Yankees
1953 Yankees

The Yanks waited nine years to integrate -- longer than the Cubs but not as long as the Cardinals (three World Championships since 1947), and when they finally brought in Elston Howard, Casey Stengel reportedly watched him in spring training and remarked, "they had to go and get me the only n_____r in the world who can't run." But that history's lost on Wiley and his race-is-everything meme. (Wiley also throws in a shot about the Marlins playing "non-sabermatrician style," but I'll leave that for another day).

Spinsanity does a good job of unraveling the controversy surrounding Wesley Clark's much-touted supposed claim that people close to the White House had called him on September 11 to urge him to falsely claim a connection between Saddam Hussein and the September 11 attacks. The conclusion: what Clark actually said amounts to a lot less than what people on the Left claimed he'd said; commentators like Paul Krugman and Michael Moore exaggerated Clark's statement, and commentators on the Right - in their zeal to disprove the claims of Krugman, Moore and others - unfairly claimed that Clark had made more sweeping and unfounded accusations than what he'd actually said. Here's The Krug's version of this particular Big Lie:

Literally before the dust had settled, Bush administration officials began trying to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq. Gen. Wesley Clark says that he received calls on Sept. 11 from "people around the White House" urging him to link the attack to Saddam Hussein.

It appears that the truth is just that in the days after September 11, Clark talked to a guy at a pro-Israeli think tank in Canada who thought Saddam might be behind the attacks and urged Clark to raise the possibility. But the real fault here has to lie with the paranoids on the Left who used and abused Clark's statement to attack the Bush Administration. And people wonder why conservatives think Krugman can't be trusted?

Dan Drezner has a post on the connections between sports and political affiliations. I don't really buy it, but it's interesting reading. Maureen Dowd uses a Cubs lede to a typically incoherent column. And Jonah Goldberg rips on something I'd meant to get to: the ridiculous New York Times editorial (No longer web-accessible) effectively rooting for the Red Sox, which is practically a parody of the old line about a liberal being a man too fair-minded to take his own side in an argument. Leaving aside the Times' bias (i.e., the fact that the paper part owns the Red Sox), the sentiment is wholly one of, shall we say, guilt at siding with the winners.

It's not that I object to New Yorkers rooting for the Sox; like most Mets fans I know, I'm pulling for them mostly out of hatred for the Yankees. And I wouldn't object to the same sentiment from an out-of-town paper; I was pulling for the Cubs, after all. It's that the Times is supposed to be one of the Yankees' home town papers, and has certainly never been exclusively a paper of Mets partisans. But the Times won't take the side of its own readers.

Gary Coleman turns out to be one of the California gubernatorial candidates who comes out of the recall looking better than he did before; Coleman has landed a gig as a political commentator for the All Comedy Radio Network. (Presumably, this is a different venture from Al Gore's rumored youth-targeted news network, although both sound like pale imitations of The Daily Show).

Personally, I thought Coleman's campaign was good-natured and appropriately tongue-in-cheek; he didn't take himself too seriously, but he gave due respect to the overall seriousness of the election. And it turns out that it got him a job. Not bad.

Follow these to the latest news: Tom Maguire and Kevin Drum on an unsourced column by Nicholas Kristof of the NYT about the CIA angle and Valerie Plame's career, and TalkLeft with some speculation about White House emails mentioning the Wilsons.

One noteworthy point: if the disclosure of Plame's name made it easy to blow the cover of her CIA front company employer (Brewster-Jennings) by checking FEC records, and if the CIA knew her identity had possibly been compromised years before by Aldrich Ames, why was she making a $1,000 political contribution and listing Brewster-Jennings as her employer, knowing that this put a connection between her and the company on the internet for all to see?

Stay tuned.

Newsweek and Instapundit pick up on an idea I first saw floated by a commenter at Calpundit about a week ago, and which seemed at the time to be immediately more credible than the alternative: that the "leak" story is much narrower than critics of the Bush Administration had been hoping, and in a way that is almost certain to disappoint Joseph Wilson and others who had hoped to see Karl Rove "frog-marched" out of the White House in irons. (Calpundit himself notes the new theory but is agnostic, and Mark Kleiman also backtracks a bit).

To summarize, if you haven't followed this saga, the critics suggested that the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative must have been part of a coordinated campaign by the White House, based on three things: (1) the anonymous Washington Post source who leaked the existence of the leak investigation said that six other reporters were contacted, but only Bob Novak ran the story; (2) Wilson claims that a reporter told him "I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife was fair game." and (3) Bush and everyone who works for him is evil.

Well, (3) is an article of faith for some folks, but it looks like there's just nothing but hope to support (1) and (2). On (1), the Newsweek story suggests that what really happened is that some senior administration official on the national security side -- perhaps someone like Lewis Libby who'd had meetings with Plame's colleagues and may have just assumed (stupidly) that she was a known Langley-based analyst (it appears this is consistent with her job duties over the last 5 or 6 years) without thinking about the fact that she could have previously been a covert operative -- blabbed her CIA status to Bob Novak as part of a broader theory of what was wrong with Wilson's Niger mission, and calls to any other reporters happened only after Rove's people read Novak's Monday morning column. This makes sense -- Rove seems more likely to have found out this type of detail from the newspapers, and I'm sure Novak is a must-read for Beltway insiders. As to (2), Newsweek suggests that the blunt formulation of "I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife was fair game" was Chris Matthews talking (after Novak's column ran), and anyone who's watched Matthews' show can see him summarizing a conversation that way, where Rove says the real angle is that Wilson's wife picked him for the Niger assignment, and Matthews boils it down to "Karl Rove is after your wife."

Looks like this story could be a lot smaller than its proponents hoped. Which is not to say there's no scandal here, but rather one that doesn't reach very far. Stay tuned.

(Daniel Drezner has more, and don't forget to keep checking Tom Maguire's blog on this issue).

UPDATE: Several of the sources I linked to above note that Atrios is pushing this item from the original Washington Post story as conclusive proof that Newsweek's story is a fraud:

Another journalist yesterday confirmed receiving a call from an administration official providing the same information about Wilson's wife before the Novak column appeared on July 14 in The Post and other newspapers.

The journalist, who asked not to be identified because of possible legal ramifications, said that the information was provided as part of an effort to discredit Wilson, but that the CIA information was not treated as especially sensitive. "The official I spoke with thought this was a part of Wilson's story that wasn't known and cast doubt on his whole mission," the person said, declining to identify the official he spoke with. "They thought Wilson was having a good ride and this was part of Wilson's story."

Assuming that the WaPo's unidentified source is credible, this supports the idea that Novak's source told essentially the same story to one other journalist. That doesn't undercut Novak's account of how the conversation unfolded, it doesn't necessarily implicate anybody but the people implicated by Novak, and it's consistent with the idea that Novak's leaker (who we'll call Source A) simply didn't realize that Plame was a former undercover operative whose indentity was apparently still classified.

Who's at fault here? Besides Source A, there's Source B (the guy who confirmed this to Novak by saying, ''Oh, you know about it'') and the idiots at CIA who not only didn't expend too much energy waving Novak off the story but then compounded the problem by confirming Plame's identity to other news outlets who called after seeing the Novak column. Clearly, Source A needs to be fired no matter who he is, and the CIA people should as well. (Source B might have an excuse here, for example if Source A is his boss or someone whose judgment on security issues he'd trusted, but it doesn't look so great for Source B at the moment either).

Let's review the Wesley Clark file for a second: Clark has no domestic policy experience, has only recently worked in the private sector, and has never held elective office. So, his credentials are strictly national security/foreign policy. Is he a more decisive leader than Bush? Hardly; his waffles on Gulf War II are already the stuff of legend. Would he have run the war itself better? Clark himself, in an April 10 London Times column, praised the Bush Administration's war-fighting strategy.

What does that leave? Well, the very core of Clark's message is his idea that we have neglected our alliances and need to work with a broader coalition. He's Coalition Man.

Which is why this latest story is so damning: Clark's campaign manager has quit, upset that Clark's DC-based political consultants have given insufficient respect to the grass-roots internet-based "Draft Clark" movement. Now, this story has a few angles, like the idea (noted here and here) that the Democrats generally are too beholden to inside-the-Beltway consultants, and the observation that Clark has forgotten that you can't conquer America by occupying Washington. But here's the key one: if Clark is selling himself to us as Coalition Man, what does it say about his qualifications that he can't even hold together a coalition of his own supporters for an entire month?

Mark Kleiman charges the White House with "an unspeakably sleazy trick that makes sense only as part of a cover-up" in the fact that documents that have been requested from White House employees by the Justice Department will be reviewed by the White House Counsel's office first and will be turned over to DOJ in two weeks. (Link via Calpundit; the same post is now up at Kleiman's new Movable Type blog).

My reaction: Kleiman and others complaining about the "two weeks" really have no clue about the work of laywers. For the White House Counsel's office to just turn over the file without reviewing everything would be irresponsible and tantamount to legal malpractice. I know we'd all love to see total, non-adversarial cooperation, but once you turn over the whole file to the Justice Department, you've got a heck of a time then arguing that the stuff is privileged when Larry Klayman and his ilk come knocking with FOIA requests (he could argue that you've waived any privileges by handing things over, and he'd have some legal support for that position). Two weeks to do a document production of this nature is not even close to a foot-dragging time frame.

I'm not suggesting the White House should take an aggressive position on privileges (or start inventing new ones, a la Bill Clinton). But any time you pull a big file of stuff, there may be things you shouldn't produce - attorney-client privileged communications, embarrassing and irrelevant personal stuff, and in this context, classified national security information that doesn't need to be spread around anymore than necessary. You do have to be careful if you don't want this one leak to open the door to more sensitive disclosures. Ask any lawyer who's represented a government agency, corporation, church, or other organizational client whether they would turn all this stuff over without anyone reviewing it.

Kleiman further claims that

This would be completely routine in a civil case. . . But in a criminal case it's unheard-of: investigators don't usually let the lawyer for one of the defendants take a look at all the documents submitted by the other potential defendants and key witnesses, even if that defendant happens to be the boss of all the others.

This is just not true, and Kleiman, a non-lawyer academic, obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. If a corporation gets a grand jury subpoena, and the company orders its employees to gather evidence, even if the investigation focuses on individuals rather than the company, you bet the company's lawyer will look at the documents. They are, after all, the company's own records. As Kleiman conveniently forgets -- and as Bill Clinton was wont to forget -- the White House counsel represents the institution of the presidency, not the president personally, and the people at issue here are employed by the executive branch. (I assume that the evidence being gathered here is people's work-related records, pursuant to requests made to the White House).

I haven't really gone into the whole Plame thing very far yet, in part because of the baseball playoffs and in part because there's only so much new I would have to add. But this particular gripe is just way overblown and a sign that guys like Kleiman are losing their grip on reality.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall cuts and pastes Kleiman's argument makes the same mistake.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Conrad from The Gweilo Diaries agrees with me. And Kleiman backtracks and tries to pretend that he didn't call this . . . well, "an unspeakably sleazy trick that makes sense only as part of a cover-up."

Andrew Sullivan, I think, gets it precisely right in measuring the distinctions between the allegations against Arnold Schwarzenegger and those against Bill Clinton, particularly the fact that Clinton's conduct involved the abuse of public office to perpetuate and cover up his misbehavior.

Now, to say that a man is not as unfit for public office as Bill Clinton is to damn him with faint praise indeed, and this really doesn't help Arnold's case on the merits. But it does point out that anyone who defended Clinton has no standing to get upset when similar and lesser charges are made against a Republican. As James Taranto pointed out, this is especially the case for MoveOn.org, a group whose sole founding principle is the idea that a politician's sexual advances, welcome or otherwise -- or anything else he may do to conceal them -- are no grounds to deny him public office.

What does this all say about Republicans? Well, most of us were, at a minimum, unwilling to accept the Democrats' idea -- which was made the basis of several 1992 Senate campaigns (notably in Pennsylvania, California, Illinois and Washington) -- that it is scandalous for anyone to disbelieve any allegation of sexual harrassment against a public official, or even to question such allegations. Suffice it to say, that idea didn't get much of a hearing from its former proponents in the 1990s. Frankly, I was never really convinced by Paula Jones' story, although I thought that the people who brought us "they just don't get it" deserved to reap what they had sown by the creation of that and other autopilot, judgment-free scandal machines (the late and unlamented independent counsel statute was another). And once the courts got involved, the merits of the original case got to be rather secondary . . . but that's another post.

Are we hypocrites? The real truth is, most of Clinton's harshest critics are either supporting McClintock or were already unhappy with Arnold but backing him in the absence of better alternatives. (I'll come right out and say here what I'm sure a lot of social conservatives are thinking about Arnold, as they thought about Bob Packwood as well: the man's social liberalism may in part be driven by a sense that he couldn't take the heat for being, say, pro-life, because his behavior towards women would make him vulnerable to attacks, and he needed a credential that would look "pro-women" to his critics. The wages of sin are paid by the innocent.)

Is Arnold unfit to be president? Quite likely yes. The presidency is a position of special trust, and things that wouldn't disqualify a man from a lesser office are bigger question marks when the White House is involved. We tolerate things in our governors and legislators, however, that we wouldn't accept from the president.

Is Arnold unfit to be governor? He's hardly the guy I'd choose first, but I'd have to say, no, not compared to the alternatives. Remember, the whole point of the recall is that the ordinary political process in California has broken down so badly in dealing with the state budget, the energy crisis and the banes of runaway litigation and regulation that it's become necessary to hold open auditions for the job. And we have seen allegations (admittedly, less well-sourced than those aimed at Arnold) of even worse behavior by Gray Davis even on top of the man's comprehensive catalog of other flaws. Bustamante? Let's face the bottom line: Bustamante's basically just more of the same thing that got California into this mess. If you're a California voter who's happy with the status quo, by all means, go vote for him.

In a better world, I wouldn't want Arnold as my governor. But if I lived in California, I'd probably pull the lever for him on the outside, desperate hope that maybe he could do something, anything to change the morass that the state's government has sunk into. Barbarian, or no barbarian.

Instapundit echoes my thoughts below on why subpoenaing reporters in the Plame investigation would be good politics.

ScrappleFace nails the Limbaugh drug allegations but good: "When I say I do this show with half my brain tied behind my back, I'm not kidding."

Now, the current controversy is not something you can gloss over by changing the subject. But it's symptomatic of a larger political problem: the Administration and the GOP haven't done one single thing since Bush's aircraft carrier speech in May to seize the newsmaking agenda or advance conservative policies. Every single thing that's happened since the beginning of May has been either (1) managing ongoing initiatives, (2) doing stuff behind the scenes, or (3) damage control. When that happens, you get to be a big, slow target for potshots; any idiot can say "the implementation of the policy isn't working," usually on the basis of an isolated anecdote, and the burden shifts to you to explain things in context, which is boring and difficult and not a story the media wants to tell. And when you lose the initiative and go to full-time siege-mentality mode, that's when people make mistakes and start worrying more about shooting messengers than about how to steal a march, grab a headline and move the chains.

It's all about managing the initiative. It's key in politics, it's key in sports (think of shortening your stroke with an 0-2 count), it's key in litigation. Right now, we've got the White House, narrow majorities in both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, but we don't have the initiative (the one exception to this is what is usually the GOP's weakest link, California electoral politics). The Plame controversy may well blow over if a culprit is swiftly identified, in stark contrast to Clinton-era controversies where administration stonewalling dragged everything out far beyond its natural lifespan. But even if that happens, unless the Bush Administration does something to start rolling out new ideas of its own, the Right will be forced back on the defensive again very quickly.

Can Bob Novak and other journalists be subpoenaed to reveal who leaked Valerie Plame's name to them? (The question assumes that there were leaks to other journalists besides Novak, but it still seems at least equally likely that the much-touted leaks to "six other journalists" were people who got calls from folks in the White House political operation after Novak's column appeared in the papers, and those would hardly count as "leaks" at all). Eugene Volokh notes some of the obstacles presented by the Justice Department's internal guidelines on subpoenas to reporters.

What Volokh misses, though, is the political dimension. Let's say that such subpoenas get issued. Presumably, some or all of the reporters involved will refuse to divulge their sources. DOJ goes to court, and the First Amendment's self-appointed champions come out of the woodwork to make this a cause celebre. Suddenly, the story is all about how John Ashcroft's Justice Department is being too aggressive in hunting for leaks. Isn't that the ideal result for the White House?

The latest White House press briefing by Scott McClellan is really a masterpiece of the art of nothing-saying. A sample:

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You know, when they're writing your obituary a week before the election and scarcely two weeks after polls had you as the front-runner, things aren't going too well. But, of course, to Democrats the name of the game is still what they can do after the votes are cast to change the result.

While I tend to agree with my co-blogger The Mad Hibernian that some of the outrage at Rush Limbaugh over his comments on Donovan McNabb is rather artificial (Howard Cosell got away with worse), the fact is that this was a really idiotic thing for Rush to say, and one that will probably doom his second career as a sportscaster. Let's put this in perspective: Rush has a new job. He comes with a reputation. Ex-ballplayers have to prove to the audience that they're not just dumb, inarticulate jocks. Dennis Miller had to prove that there was a place for a comedian in the Monday Night Football booth. The one thing Rush has to prove is that he can keep his politics out of his football commentary. Responding to questions about the NFL's silly minority-hiring mandates is one thing; the network asked him to give his take on that controversial subject.

If Terry Bradshaw or John Madden said Donovan McNabb was overrated in part because of his race, it wouldn't be news. Bill Simmons, last Friday:

I can't imagine any QB in the league playing worse than McNabb did two weeks ago. Is he even that good? It's like the Ben Affleck thing -- everyone keeps telling me that Ben Affleck is a major movie star, enough times that you even start believing it ... but check out his filmography on IMDB.com some time. Not exactly a bevy of hits. Same goes for McNabb. For a few years, he was a winning QB on a very good football team. Doesn't make him a superstar.

But a lot of people will now just say, "Limbaugh. We knew he was a bigot." And that doesn't help Rush's ability to get people to hear his political message, either.

UPDATE: I seem to be behind the news cycle a bit on Limbaugh - more on the broader story later.

Bob Novak's column this morning is about . . . well, about Bob Novak:

To protect my own integrity and credibility, I would like to stress three points. First, I did not receive a planned leak. Second, the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson's wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else. Third, it was not much of a secret.

* * *

During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA's counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger. When I called another official for confirmation, he said: ''Oh, you know about it.'' The published report that somebody in the White House failed to plant this story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn is simply untrue.

If you're keeping score at home, Novak is dropping some minor hints on who the leakers were . . .

The Washington Post also has a profile of Wilson with some more personal details.

I don't have the ambition to do a big post on this yet -- but Sparkey over at Sgt. Stryker noted something vurrrry interesting: Joseph Wilson is employed by the Middle East Institute, a think tank funded by my friend and yours, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. (He's also apparently an advisor to a lobbying firm for the Turkish government).

Now, let's assume for the sake of argument that Valerie Plame really was a covert operative -- or even an analyst with access to sensitive information and responsibility for interpreting it -- working on sensitive WMD intelligence issues. Am I the only one who finds it scary that, at the very same time, her husband is on the payroll of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is (to put it mildly) at least an arguably unfriendly government? At the risk of sounding like Tailgunner Joe here, how many other people on the CIA's Middle East/terrorism/WMD beat are financially supported by the Wahabbis or other hostile/fanatical foreign powers? And if there isn't a law against this, shouldn't there be?

France revises the death toll from August's heat wave upward to 14,000. The methodology (counting as heat-related any number of deaths beyond the deaths in the same period the prior year) still seems a bit flimsy to me, but a spike of a few hundred over prior periods could be chance; a spike of 14,000 means that probably something over 10,000 is the real number actually caused by the heat.

This is a Bangladesh-size humanitarian disaster. Maybe we can get a benefit concert going to buy air conditioners for elderly Frenchpersons. Call it Cool-Aid.

Yesterday's big news was retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Hugh Shelton's statement at a college forum hinting at why he wouldn't support his former colleague Wesley Clark for president:

"I've known Wes for a long time. I will tell you the reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart. I'm not going to say whether I'm a Republican or a Democrat. I'll just say Wes won't get my vote."

(Emphasis added). Now, this is a little too tantalizing, and while General Shelton may not have expected the Drudge Report to circulate his comments nationally, he should have known this could be newsworthy. He can't stop at this statement, because he's left us with two possibilities:

1. Something in Clark's record of service as Supreme Commander of NATO - beyond what we already know - reflects poorly on his "integrity and character" and resulted in his unceremonious termination from that post. If this is the case, given that Clark now seeks the most powerful job on earth on the basis of a resume that is painfully thin on conduct that has been subjected to public scrutiny and at a time of great danger for the nation, Shelton's got an absolute responsibility to the public to tell us the whole story. (I should add that, if there's something unsavory or just unflattering here, some people who have been falling over themselves to line up behind Clark are going to have some mighty big egg on their faces, especially people from the Clinton Administration who'd be in a position to know such a thing).

2. Shelton's vague reference is just a value judgment on what we already know about Clark's sometimes bristly relationship (typical of many civilian-military relationships) with the political branches or with other generals, in which case Shelton's statement has the effect of unfairly smearing Clark's reputation by implying something darker. I've made this point before about publicly floated rumors about Tom Cruise, Barry Bonds and Mike Piazza: don't imply something if you're not willing to come right out and say it, and don't do either if you don't have some evidence to back it up.

(UPDATE: Instapundit quotes Spoons quoting Ramesh Ponuru making basically the same point. So does Kevin Drum. So I'm in good company here.)

On another note, Shelton also related a story that reflects very, very badly on an unnamed (probably Republican, I'm guessing) member of Congress:

Three days after Shelton took office as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his commitment to the integrity of the military was tested. When U.S. planes in the Iraq no-fly zone were attacked, a member of Congress suggested that perhaps "we" could fly a U-2 spy plane so low over Iraq that it could easily get hit. Then we'd have a reason "to kick Saddam out of Iraq." After Shelton responded that he would order that "just as soon as you are qualified to fly (it)," he was not asked again to compromise his office.

"Sometimes people in a position of power lose perspective on right and wrong," Shelton said.

You could say that.

Josh Marshall has noted the unsavory tendency of Howard Dean backers to tear into fellow Democrats who aren't Clean for Dean, or whatever. Kevin Drum, reviewing Dean's reaction to the Wesley Clark boomlet, picks up the same theme, and frets that Dean himself is showing signs of confusing himself with the greater good of the Democratic Party.

I've been saying this for a while now: Dean's campaign and personality have so much in common with John McCain's, that the real test of whether he's got what it takes to win the nomination will be his ability to avoid McCain's fatal mistake, which was turning his guns away from the opposing party and on to his own party's troops. Dean's followers have been escalating the friendly fire already, but things will unravel for Dean very badly if he responds to the Clark phenomenon by opening a second front against the Clintonites who control the party machinery and who have been none-too-subtly pushing Clark precisely as an alternative to Dean.

The Command Post reports that John Kerry has accused Howard Dean of being - gasp! - a fan of the Hated Yankees. Dean, of course, is a transplanted New Yorker, and that wouldn't go over well in New Hampshire. Dean is denying this scurrilous charge.

The Dixie Chicks have essentially divorced country music. This was an inevitable development; there's no art form quite like country music in terms of the fans' demand for an emotional, one-of-us connection with the artists. The Chicks may have impaired that bond with Natalie Maines' ill-chosen anti-Bush and anti-Texas remarks, but if they'd left it at that, it would have been all. But once the Chicks started portraying themselves as First Amendment martyrs (probably the key moment was the nude magazine cover), they basically set themselves into a melodrama with their own fans cast as the villains. You'll win a lot of new friends in Hollywood that way, but you can never again go back to the country crowd once you've sided with people like Bob Herbert (who called country music fans "flag-waving yahoos").

How long until the "Dixie" is dropped from the band's name?

Looks like another collection of Reagan's writings is about to be published, this time his letters.

Now, I've known only two Rhodes Scholars in my time (at least that I can think of offhand), and neither particularly well, but doesn't Andrew Sullivan appear to be overgeneralizing a wee bit, in his haste to attack Wesley Clark, when he says that "[a]lmost to a man and woman, they [Rhodes Scholars] are mega-losers, curriculum-vitae fetishists, with huge ambition and no concept of what to do with it."

About the only thing worth examining on Wesley Clark's resume -- at least as far as his qualifications for high executive leadership are concerned -- is his leadership of the Kosovo war. For this reason, attention has focused on the charge that Clark risked starting a war with the Russians with aggressive operations at Pristina Airport until cooler heads prevailed. The charge is deeply ironic, since it casts Clark as precisely the hot-headed, unilateral, overly aggressive cowboy that his supporters love to caricature George W. Bush as being.

Sergeant Stryker has taken an enlightening closer look at this incident, and while there remains fair grounds for dispute over Clark's judgment, it's clear that he showed good instincts -- not backing down from aggression just to keep the allies happy -- and that his reaction was one of the reasonable options. Where you ultimately come out on the proper resolution of this particular crisis depends in large part on what you think of the whole murky Kosovo operation, a subject that I admit I paid little attention to at the time and on which I never bothered to form a strong opinion.

Andrew Sullivan, by contrast, has a much more damning take on Clark's 2002 article in the Washington Monthly, in which he lauds the value of running foreign policy by committee.

Ted Kennedy has gone off the deep end with a recent interview in which he bellowed about the Iraq War that

There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud, . . . [Referring to costs of the war, Kennedy added that m]y belief is this money is being shuffled all around to these political leaders in all parts of the world, bribing them to send in troops . . .

Yup, Ted K, he knows his frauds. Hey, wasn't Vietnam made up in Hyannisport? Just asking . . . . the Democrats keep raising the stakes with all this vitriol, and maybe they need to; people don't generally vote out the incumbent if they aren't mad at him. But they seem hell-bent on alienating anybody who isn't steaming mad at the president, and that is how they could wind up with an Alf Landon-sized disaster.

The Sacramento Bee's Daniel Weintraub has some advice Ronald Reagan might give Arnold Schwarzenegger:

I remember how Reagan almost never used the word “Democrat” when criticizing his opponents. I always assumed that this was because he wanted every possible Democrat to vote for him, and he figured that blasting the party by name would make its members defensive and less likely to support him. So he always said things like “there are those who would undermine our security…” or “my opponents say…”

Man, you can just smell the desperation in the comments by Democrats lining up to support Wesley Clark for president:

It's very bad for me as a Democrat to be tagged as somebody who doesn't support the military," said Rep. Baron Hill, D-Ind. "He takes that issue back for us." Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., a decorated veteran of the Korean War who is backing Clark, said the former NATO supreme commander "is Teflon to the question of being a patriot." Democrats "need someone who'll stand up with Bush and doesn't have to say, 'I'm as patriotic as you are, now let's debate the issues,'" Rangel said.

Translation: "we don't care if he can win, at least he won't make us look like America-hating, stuck-in-the-Sixties, tie-dye and Birkenstock-wearing peacenik wusses in the process." Of course, it's a ridiculous canard that Republicans question the patriotism of anyone with dangerously bad judgment in foreign policy, but then a good chunk of Howard Dean's support comes from people who really are unpatriotic, in the sense that they can't or won't agree with James Lileks' simple mantra about Iraq: I hope we win.

Tennessee Rep. John Tanner, a member of the Blue Dog coalition, said many in the group like Clark's emphasis on fiscal discipline as well as his military background. Tanner said Clark brings a perspective that needs to be heard in the presidential race. When asked if he would support Clark, Tanner said he already pledged to support Gephardt early in the race.

Translation: there's nobody in the race like that now.

South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, whose support is being sought by several presidential candidates, said Clark called him Tuesday night to let him know he was entering the race. Clyburn said he will consider endorsing Clark.

"I think having Wesley Clark demonstrates very forcefully that we are soldiers, we are patriots, we are lovers of this country," Clyburn said.

Translation: you couldn't get that from the other Democrats in the race. Note that Clyburn all but comes out and says that Clark is really just there to cast a warm protective glow of military experience around a party that has been more than a little cool towards the military.

[Long Island Democrat Steve] Israel said no other candidate in the race can confront Bush so effectively on national security.

"When the president is debating Wesley Clark and has to call him 'General,' it becomes highly problematic for the president," Israel said.

In other words, nobody else even causes a ripple in the president's support on national security. Of course, what's more relevant experience: being a general or being the Commander-in-Chief?

The problem for the Democrats is the down-ticket issue: if Bob Graham and John Breaux don't run for re-election, the Dems could wind up defending open Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana, plus an incumbent in Arkansas. Who wants to be a "Howard Dean Democrat" in those races?

(Then again, things aren't going perfectly on the GOP end in the Senate races either)

Finally, the quote of the week, from Mickey Kaus, on the other celebrated military veteran in the race:

Watching [John] Kerry thrash, flip-flop, and nuance his way to humiliating primary defeat will be one of the few pleasures of the upcoming presidential campaign.

There hasn't been a train wreck that was this much fun to watch since Mark Green.

Continuing from yesterday:

2. Spending

This is the part of Dean's record that is the subject of the most contested talking points on each side. Dean's backers, eager to show that he is really more fiscally conservative than President Bush (I'll leave the issue of when the Democrats became the green eyeshade party for another day), love to point out that he repeatedly balanced Vermont's budget and even ran surpluses, despite the fact that Vermont (unlike most states) does not have a constitutional requirement of a balanced budget.

At first glance, it's a good record. McClaughry grouses that some of this was smoke and mirrors:

On several occasions during those years he was forced to make some spending cuts. In his earlier years, he favored directing his department heads to reduce their spending. In later years, he became adept at fund raiding and cost shifting. On the former point, Jack Hoffman, the longtime liberal commentator for the Vermont Press Bureau, observed in 2002 that "Dean's proposal to squeeze the education fund looks less like an exercise of fiscal restraint and more like an old fashioned raid on the one account that's still healthy."

This, to me, sounds like par for the course for state governors; Al Gore made essentially the same charge about Bush's budget-balancing record in Texas. Let's accept, for now, the idea that Dean kept a close eye on discretionary spending. There are still two caveats here.

First, of course, there are a variety of reasons why balancing the Vermont budget in the 1990s is a lot easier than balancing the federal budget today. Vermont has just over 600,000 inhabitants, a fact I still find shocking; New York City has a third of that in a single police precinct, and Texas has 21 million people. Like the Scandanavian countries it chooses as a model, Vermont is heavily rural (Dean has never had to contend with the problems of a major city), almost absurdly ethnically homogenous (96.8% white and just a third of the national average speaks a language other than English at home), which reduces a number of the social frictions that create government headaches, and of course, Vermont has no defense budget. You could institute Platonically ideal policies for Vermont that still wouldn't work at the national level. The stock market boom of the 1990s made everyone's job easier. Also, as Kevin Drum noted the other day, it's easier to balance your budget when your state is a net recipient of federal tax payments, as is Vermont (again, unlike, say, Texas).

Second, and far more significantly, while it's true that the GOP has not been diligent about policing spending, the real gripe conservatives have with the Democrats is that their policy proscriptions invariably involve creating big entitlement programs that, once set in motion, can never be cut or eliminated. As Steven Moore notes, that's exactly what Dean seems to have done in Vermont, creating:

a state-funded universal health care system (which as president he would take nationwide), government-subsidized child care (even for the rich), . . . a mega-generous prescription drug benefit for seniors with incomes up to four times the poverty level, . . . and taxpayer-funded campaigns.

The NR piece I noted yesterday contended that Vermont's new Republican governor had found it necessary already to trim the sails of Dean's healthcare plan to keep the budget in balance. And, as with taxes, that is the question voters have to ask themselves about Dean: what does he propose to do? The answer, of course -- as I'm sure we'll discuss in more detail as the campaign goes on -- is still more big entitlement programs.

Dean kept the budget of a tiny state in balance during boom years. That's not nothing, but it bears about as much resemblance to balancing the federal budget as does balancing your checkbook.

If you turn on CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN right now, you'll see that Wesley Clark is being interviewed on all four at the same time.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article some weeks ago by John McClaughry, a conservative former Vermont state senator who twice ran very unsuccessfully for governor against Howard Dean (in 1992 and 1994; the first time, Dean won 202,115 to 62,805), criticizing Dean's record as governor. The National Review ran a big piece a few months back that was largely sourced from McClaughry, and a Google search reveals him as probably the main critic of Dean's Vermont record. There's nothing wrong with that -- McCalughry is obviously the most prominent of the state's few conservatives -- but there's a danger in letting all the anti-Dean memes arise from one man's point of view.

So, what's McClaughry's line? I haven't gone back to Vermont sources myself; I'm just evaluating what McClaughry, the NR piece and some the major pro-Dean articles (including a surprisingly favorable review from supply-side firebrand Stephen Moore) have cited as Dean's major pros and cons. Let's start with:

1. Taxes. Dean apparently never raised income taxes in his years as Vermont governor, and even managed an across-the-board 4% cut in 1999. That's a major plus, one that shows a guy willing to work outside his party's usual rut and who isn't enamored of high progressive tax rates simply for their own sake. (The fact that Dean may have done this with one eye on his political future is not a knock on him; a Democrat who at least thinks that cutting taxes is in his political best interests is halfway there). McClaughry blasts Dean for using the income tax cuts as cover to hike other, less visible taxes:

During his last eight years Mr. Dean signed into law increases in the sales and use, rooms, meals, liquor, cigarette, and electrical energy taxes. In 1997 he raised the corporate, telecommunications, bank franchise, and gasoline taxes. Dwarfing all of these was his approval of a state education finance "reform" built on a new 1.1% state real property tax.

Moore, who pulls no punches even in attacking Bush on tax and spending issues, is less charitable:

This is the second-highest taxing-and-spending state in the country, with collections about $600 per person above the national average . . . At one time or another, Dean raised just about every tax he could get his hands on. During his 12 years as governor, he upped the corporate income tax rate by 1.5 percentage points, the sales tax by 1 percentage point, the cigarette tax by 50 cents a pack, and the gas tax by 5 cents a gallon. Sure he balanced the budget every year--by digging deeper into Vermonters' wallets.

This is actually a common gripe raised at tax-cutting Republican governors, but it's a fair criticism. McClaughry doesn't give us perspective on the relative sizes of the various tax hikes and cuts.

In the end, though, none of this really matters, because whatever credit Dean deserves for his state record on taxes, he's made a crystal-clear promise to repeal every jot and tittle of Bush's tax rate cuts, and I take him at his word on that promise. Dean may be hoping that he can use his mixed record on taxes in Vermont to convince the public that because he's a reasonable guy, his belief that we need to jack taxes back up to pre-2001 levels should be taken seriously. But then, Dean's campaign persona comes off as a lot less sober and reasonable than Walter Mondale's, and look where the tax hike pledge got Mondale (I haven't seen polling on the issue lately, but I suspect that the Bush tax cuts mostly remain popular and that most people don't favor repealing the whole thing). Raising taxes isn't just bad policy, it's bad politics as well.

OK, I've been off the blogging routine a bit lately. Yesterday I finished a gigantic time suck, as we wrapped up refinancing our mortgage, so that's out of the way.

Of course, it's also been a depressing time to write. The Mets have long since been down the crapper, their one exciting young player is done for the season, and the Hated Yankees are leaving the Red Sox in the dust again. And, of course, the Bush Administration went through its usual pre-Labor Day snooze (a trend dating back to the 2000 campaign); while I don't think things are going that badly overall, it's hard to deny that conservatism and the Bush Administration have been playing nothing but defense all summer, with no major initiatives out there -- on the domestic or foreign policy fronts that promise to do anything but consolidate recent gains.

But the fray needs to be rejoined, so I hope to be starting to get back on schedule soon.

Interview with the indispensable P.J. O'Rourke over at the Onion, including a classic O'Rourke story that combines Animal House with stock options and some well-earned contempt for Rick Reilly. (Link via The American Scene). On the difference between himself and Hunter Thompson:

His political stuff is just wonderful, but basically nothing happens. It's all about his reaction to a situation. And my stuff is much more externally driven. He brings a lunatic genius to ordinary events, and I bring an ordinary sensibility to lunatic events.

On the plague of lawyers:

I buy a tractor two years ago, and four-fifths of the tractor manual is about not tipping over, not raising the bucket high enough to hit high-tension wire... not killing yourself, basically. The tractor itself is covered with stickers: Don't put your hand in here. Don't put your d___ in there. And in that manual, I found out—and it cost me a thousand dollars—that when the tractor is new, 10 hours into use of the tractor, you have to re-torque the lug nuts. If you don't, you will oval the holes. This is buried between the moron warnings. I never found it. I take the tractor in for its regular servicing, and they say my wheels are gone. A thousand dollars worth of wheels have to be replaced because I didn't re-torque after 10 hours. How am I supposed to know that? "It's in the manual." You f___ing read that manual! You go through 40 pages of how not to tip over!

And some good advice for bloggers and other creatures:

O: Do you ever have a crisis of confidence when you're writing, where you say, "Man, I don't know if I'm right about this?"

PO: If I do, I say so. That's the only way out of that. If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life... it's the magic words "I don't know." I mean, there are certain basic principles... There are certain things that I feel pretty confident about. But when I get in deep water, I prefer to announce that I'm in over my head.

Eugene Volokh has an amusing story with links to a groveling apology Al Franken had to issue to John Ashcroft after sending him a bogus survey mocking the idea of waiting for marriage to have sex. Franken's contempt and incomprehension at the concept and anyone who would practice it is, unfortunately, all too typical of the political Left.

The president's speech last night contained few surprises. Bush said what he needed to say:

Two years ago, I told the Congress and the country that the war on terror would be a lengthy war, a different kind of war, fought on many fronts in many places. Iraq is now the central front. Enemies of freedom are making a desperate stand there -- and there they must be defeated. This will take time and require sacrifice. Yet we will do what is necessary, we will spend what is necessary, to achieve this essential victory in the war on terror, to promote freedom and to make our own nation more secure.

All the key concepts in what has been called the neoconservative battle plan were on full display: the idea that the struggle against terrorism is a single, multi-front war; the idea that the fight in Iraq is part of "a systematic campaign against terrorism" that began after September 11; the idea that "[t]he Middle East will either become a place of progress and peace, or it will be an exporter of violence and terror that takes more lives in America and in other free nations . . . Everywhere that freedom takes hold, terror will retreat"; the analogy to the rebuilding of Germany and Japan after World War II; and the repeated references to democracy as the goal of our rebuilding in Iraq.

Then the president finishes up, and (on NBC, where I was watching this), Joe Biden gets on, says he likes the speech but characterizes it as a 180 degree reversal from what "the neoconservatives," who he identifies as "Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz" have been telling Bush. Huh? I mean, Biden does identify some conflicts: he notes that some of the difficulties and troop requirements had been prefigured by hearings held by Richard Lugar and Biden before the war, as opposed to some administration sources. But the core message here is the "neocon" strategy 101.

As for the request for UN help . . . as I noted, I'm not a fan of letting the UN decide anything here, but as more attentive commentators have noted, Bush is just asking for UN auspices to add additional troops from other nations that would remain under US/UK command. Which is what the UN was supposed to be about anyway. This isn't new ground . . . the whole idea of the UN was that it was supposed to be more effective than the League of Nations in stopping aggressive tyrannies, in part because it would abandon the League's pretenses at imposing rules on the great powers (which were a big reason why the US refused to join in 1919) and would instead serve primarily as a vehicle for concerted action. In short, the UN was established with the intent of eliminating barriers to collective action, so long as such action didn't infringe on the interests of any of the permanent members of the Security Council.

Thus, the idea that it is the UN's role to arbitrate the international legitimacy of war with Iraq was always misguided, and remains so now; the only proper question for the UN is whether it is in the interests of enough members of the international community to justify using the UN as a vehicle to organize a division to participate in rebuilding Iraq. Period.

The GOP's hopes of picking up Senate seats to solidify the majority got brighter today when John Edwards announced that he would not seek re-election so he could focus on his campaign for the presidency, notwithstanding his complete failure to get any traction in polls in the first three primary states (including neighboring South Carolina). Of course, Edwards was far from a sure thing to get re-elected anyway, but the Republicans now have to be favored to pick this one up.

Another item from last week that I meant to comment on at the time -- an entry from CalPundit, linking to South Knox Bubba, on the charge that a corporation fought efforts to rename the street its headquarters is on after Martin Luther King. Kevin Drum's sarcastic comment:

STILL SOME WORK TO DO....Racism? A thing of the past. And everybody loves Martin Luther King these days, right?

Apparently not quite everybody.

This is a typical entry in left/liberal bloggers' campaign to keep alive the charge of racism (although in fairness to Kevin Drum, he at least has had a healthy skepticism about racial preferences). But it's one heck of a weak example; if you scan the comments at the two sites, you'll see among other things that this happened in 1981.

But there's a larger point at work: if stuff like this is your Smoking Gun proving the continuing existence of Racism in America -- given that it happened 22 years ago, there are other not-entirely-racist reasons why one might do this, and that nobody was personally affected by this decision -- it might well be that you are grasping at straws. I don't think that anybody really believes that racism is dead and gone; stories like the now-infamous whites-only prom in a small town in rural Georgia are reminders that it is not. But it's a totally false choice to make one side bear the burden of proving that it is. The fact is, it is the Left that makes the argument for governmental and private initiatives, including but not limited to racial preferences, that are designed to fight racism. Nearly everyone agrees that these initiatives would be stupid, unfair or a waste of taxpayer money if there is not a significant amount of racism to combat in the particular case of each such initiative. And yet, the evidence that racism exists in the US today in sufficiently extensive scale and effect to justify the measures being proposed is almost always laughably thin, based on fairly isolated anecdotes, based on bald assertions that it is racist to even question the evidence of racism, or extrapolated from statistical differences in the situation of groups without any consideration of possible alternative factors. But the party proposing a government solution to a problem always has the burden of explaining why the problem is so big that we can't fight it any other way. (The lack of proportion and reliance on faulty statistics and overblown anecdotes to justify government programs is hardly limited to race -- the same tactics are too common in debates about the environment, for example.)

In other words, saying that racism exists is like saying that a disease exists, people have it and people are dying of it. Well, OK: but before you propose to do something about that, it makes sense to question how many people have the disease, and what proportion of them are actually dying of it. Otherwise, you may wind up using a hammer to swat a fly.

Liberal Slate writer (as if there's any other kind) Will Saletan is just brutal in his assessment of John Kerry, calling him a political coward who's less animated than a triple amputee. If anything, Saletan hates Kerry even more than Mickey Kaus does.

Hypothesis: liberal writers who lived through the Gore campaign don't want to spend another year with a Democratic candidate who shares essentially all the same faults.

Yes, it's too early to win a race like this -- but it's not too early to lose.

New polls showing Howard Dean with a commanding lead in New Hampshire have convinced me: John Kerry is toast. He's losing ground and losing press coverage and trailing badly in native-son territory. Kerry doesn't excite anybody; he had relied on the aura of a frontrunner, and that's history now.

This shocks me, since I have suspected for some time that Kerry would win the nomination by virtue of most nearly straddling the middle of his party. I still think that can be done, but not by a guy so obviously trying to do so. Maybe the Dems have learned something from the Gore fiasco.

Lieberman can't win the nomination, unless he gets a real miracle in support from African-Americans, because he's become the symbol for party activists of the DINO (Democrat in Name Only) on taxes, war, religion and business regulation. Dean, on the other hand, remains vulnerable because non-Chomskyite Democrats over the age of about 23 realize his stances on taxes and war and possibly his identification with gay marriage and general Vermontism would make him poison in a national election. That creates space in the middle, and Kerry's implosion and Bob Graham's dullness and ill health leave that field mostly to Edwards, Gephardt and now perhaps Wesley Clark.

But Edwards, who I predicted to win the nomination back in January, has been a disaster, running in fifth place at 4% (to Dean's 38%, Kerry's 17% and Gephardt's 11%) in New Hampshire and fifth place at 6% (to Dean's 25% and Gephardt's 21%) in Iowa, and (in a poll done about a month ago), tied for fourth with 5% (to 13% for Lieberman and 8% apiece for Gephardt and Al Sharpton) in neighboring South Carolina. The only obvious explanation for this is Edwards' obvious unreadiness to be commander-in-chief, even when compared to someone like Dean, who would be a foreign policy disaster but at least has strong opinions on the subject.

Jeff Quinton, the Backcountry Conservative, has a roundup of links to an assortment of attacks on Wesley Clark from the Right, the Left, and sources in between (especially his record in Kosovo, which after all is his sole claim to fame), although I'm not sure I would grant a lot of credence to far-Left sites like zpub.com. I guess this is a sign that people are starting to think seriously about Clark as a presidential candidate riding to rescue the Democrats from Howard Dean.

This is probably good news for the Democrats, actually -- it's a sign that Nancy Pelosi hasn't made a big impression on the national scene when the NY Daily News can run headlines about "Pelosi" and they're talking about somebody completely different. It's one thing to not have reached the status of being identified by one name, but when somebody else claims your name, you haven't made it yet with the public.

So the Democrats have fanned out accross the airwaves, telling us that recalling a sitting governor is a terrible idea; commentators on the left (and even skeptics of unbridled democracy on the right, like George Will and Jonah Goldberg) have told us that the sky will fall if the people can up and pull the rug out on an incumbent who only just got re-elected, out of pique over the budget.

I am reminded of Jane Galt's comment about the French election fiasco of 2002: "They're completely missing the point, which is that it's hilarious." The fact that the recall is an expensive, complicated three-ring circus full of celebrities and celebrity wanna-bes, many of whom know nothing of politics or even decency, and that even the guy who lost to Davis less than a year ago is running again -- that's actually all for the good, for two reasons. First, how much bigger a signal of anger can the public send to a special-interest-captured political class than to mock them by making us listen to Larry Flynt and Gary Coleman and making them run in fear of a bodybuilder with a thick Austrian accent? And second, the farcical nature of the recall is also a useful reminder to voters that nobody really wants to go through this again if it's not really necessary.

Shouldn't recalls be saved for the most extreme cases, like corruption? I agree that a recall should be sparingly used (although there have been recall petitions circulated against every California governor in memory). But this is a situation that calls for it: Davis' record as governor is entirely indefensible, and his popularity (30% approval rating on the day he was re-elected, down to around 23% now) is so narrow that a plurality candidate really wouldn't have measurably less support anyway. And his integrity, while not about to get him out of office via indictment, is also a serious problem, given his long rap sheet of skirting the ethical limits of obsessive fund-raising.

Is the recall badly designed? Well, yes. There ought to be a runoff. But, like the fact that Bill Simon turned out to be a dreadful candidate, this isn't really an excuse to make Californians and the nation live with Davis for three more years. The McLaughlin Group's Tony Blankley gets this right.

The recall is California's only remaining weapon against Sacramento. It can't help but produce better government than what the Golden State has now.

A George W. Bush action figure can lead to many jokes. Personally, I wonder if "Actual figure may vary slightly from item shown" means they may ship yours in a Vietnam-era Air National Guard aviator uniform.

OK, this has been linked to all over the place, but you must read Mark Steyn's analysis of Arnold's campaign in California; highlight (emphasis added):

Yes, he's not a professional politician. And that's a disadvantage? The professional politicians are the ones who got California into this mess. This is a "throw the bum out" election, so the successful challenger will be the one who looks least like the bum. Gray Davis has been on the public payroll his entire adult life: he represents the full-time political class. Arnold represents the other California: entrepreneurial energy, wit and invention, the California that understands that if Hollywood and Silicon Valley were run by "qualified" people like Davis we'd still be watching flickering silents and you'd need union-approved quill-feathers to send e-mail.

Arnold made his first business investment at 19, using savings from his bodybuilding contests to buy a failed Munich gym. He turned it around. The first really big money he made in America in the early 1970s came when he and a fellow bodybuilder started a bricklaying business. He's one of a very few actors who was a millionaire before he ever acted. And, if you think it's no big deal being the world's highest-paid movie star, you try it - with a guttural German accent so thick you can barely do dialogue and a body frame so large you're too goofy for playing love scenes. From his gym to his mail-order company to his masonry business to his shopping malls, Schwarzenegger has shown a consistent knack for exploiting the fullest financial value from even his most modest successes. Who would you say best embodies the spirit of California? The guy who has made all his own money? Or the fellows who've squandered everybody else's?

Bob Novak has the latest on rising tensions in the Senate over the religious dimension of opposition to Bush judicial nominees.

Hillary Clinton does her Don Mossi impression.

(OK, not everyone's going to get that joke. Actually, I've been reading Jim Bouton's Ball Four -- for the first time, it will surprise some of you to learn -- and Bouton describes Mossi as looking "like a cab going down the street with its doors open")

John Fund discusses Arnold Schwarzenegger's remarkable ability to keep the real truth about his plans to run for governor quiet until the last minute. But here's something I didn't know about his consultants: "Several played a pivotal role in Boris Yeltsin's come-from-behind re-election campaign for Russian president in 1996."

Go back to 1984. You are leaving the theater after watching "Terminator", and somebody tells you that in less than 20 years, not only will Arnold be running for governor of California, but he'll be using campaign consultants with experience in Russian elections.

What a world.

If you want a picture of a party that has gone mad with its purism, look at what labor demands of the California Democrats.

From Drudge:

Hillary Says Buying Books A Luxury For Most People
Tue Aug 05 2003 10:25:18 ET

Hillary Clinton on NBC Leno: "But people have been terrific. You know, they come to the line, they have stories, they tell me this is the first book they've ever bought or they bring their daughters to meet me."

Leno then asked whether "if they're an adult and this is the first book -- doesn't that say something about our education?"

Clinton replied, "Well, it might say something about their income. You know, books, for a lot of people books are a luxury. You know, maybe they go to the library instead."

Discussing protestors at her book signings, Leno said, "And for most of them, it would probably be the first book they ever bought." Hillary replied, "Or read."

What's really depressing here is the thought that some of these folks are going to come away with the idea that all books are like this one. I opened it at random in a bookstore at Penn Station a few weeks back, and within a few sentences, the thing was just unreadable -- a thick soup of cliches and trite sermonettes. No human being talks like this. A nonfiction book needs to take one of three approaches: (1) a conversational tone, (2) a stirring polemic, or (3) a gripping yarn you could tell over a campfire. Hillary's book is none of the above. At least nutjobs like Ann Coulter and Michael Moore can write.

I knew there was a reason I still like the guy: John McCain's recommended summer reading list includes "Moneyball." (It also includes Margaret Carlson's book; McCain understands that the way to the Beltway press corps' heart is to plug their books on a national radio show). Then there's his latest "Pork Report":

From the Defense Appropriations Bill:

*$12 million for the 21st Century Truck. This program has been around for years and not once has the Department of Defense requested funding for it. While I'm sure we all would love to jump into a truck that could be in a James Bond movie, I'm not sure it is appropriate for the Department of Defense to pay for it.

*$3.4 million for the Next Generation Smart Truck. I suppose this is what we will drive before the 21st Century Truck is ready.

James Taranto has rightly wondered whether politicians can blog, but McCain is one of the few who at least has the right attitude: he's contrarian, he's sarcastic, he speaks before he thinks, and he doesn't much care who he offends. Come to think of it, those are the same reasons why he unraveled as a presidential candidate.

Now if only he'd renounce his support for Shoeless Joe Jackson . . .

In fine form: "If Arnold is the savior of California, I guess that means that Jesse Ventura was his John the Baptist." Plus, his thoughts on the new Episcopal bishop.

One of the questions political people ask about a candidate -- especially a presidential candidate -- is, "would you want to have a beer with this guy?" It may be unfair, and it may be a male-oriented question, but the political reality is that the voting public tends to look for a relaxed, easygoing manner in their president -- partly as a signal of some fundamental stability, partly because we are inviting this guy into our living rooms for four years, and don't want to wind up like that Saturday Night Live sketch where President Al Gore is giving droning lectures and pop quizzes to the nation. This phenomenon crosses party lines; Reagan and George W. Bush benefitted from the perception that they were guys you could have a relaxing chat over a beer with, and so did Clinton and JFK.

So how do today's Democrats survive the brew test? Here's one man's ranking:

1. Joe Lieberman. Lieberman suffers with Democratic voters from the perception that . . . well, as Jon Stewart put it, "Lieberman is the candidate for people who like George W. Bush but think he's not Jewish enough." Conservatives like me tend to like him for the same reason, although Lieberman's actual voting record, at least on domestic policy, is fairly conventionally liberal. (In fact, outside of the Big Two issues of national security and taxes, Lieberman may be more liberal than Howard Dean).

But Lieberman's personality may actually be one of his secret weapons; he seems like a fundamentally sane guy (his religious upbringing is undoubtedly a plus), and yet he's got just enough dry humor to avoid coming off as dull as, say, Bob Graham.

Of course, this isn't a consensus. Will Saletan of Slate finds Lieberman as dull as dishwater, and he's seen a lot more of him on the stump than I have. And some people find "pious Joe" and his moral pronouncements grating. But I still think he's a guy you wouldn't mind having a normal conversation with.

2. Dick Gephardt. First of all, you can see the Geniality Gap in stark relief when Dick Gephardt is my second choice to share a beer with. This is totally subjective, but while Gephardt speaks in soundbites, you get the sense that he's not so much a focus group guy as more like a high school debater who thinks politicians are supposed to sound like this if they want to push their constitutents' buttons about "The Rich." The fact that Gephardt comes from a fairly humble background also gets some points for normality here.

3. John Edwards. Ditto on that last point for Edwards, but by now we're already into the territory of people I would actively dislike even if they weren't running for president. Edwards just seems too damn satisfied with how smooth he is, and doesn't seem like a guy who could turn that "off" to stand around a barbecue grill on a summer day and just shoot the breeze.

4. Al Sharpton. OK, I really, really hate Al Sharpton; you have to be from New York to truly understand why. But at least he'd tell some entertaining whoppers. Downside: you'd have to pick up the tab.

5. Carol Mosely-Braun. By default. Her personality doesn't make much of an impression.

6. Bob Graham. 7-7:15: Consumed beer with blogger. 7:15-7:20: Took a leak.

7. John Kerry. Kerry has cornered the market on the elusive Al Gore Grand Slam of personality traits: he manages to come off as simultaneously mean, boring, condescending and insincere. Try it sometime -- it's not easy. Like Gore, you get the sense that Kerry -- also a son of privilege -- decided to run for president by looking in a mirror and thinking, "I really look presidential."

8. Howard Dean. The New Hampshire Primary has historically been very good to angry candidates and scrappy insurgents. Not so for the general election, as Andrew Sullivan notes. It's easy to get caught up in the guy who's angriest at the other side; I did myself in 2000, when I backed McCain in the primaries. You may have forgotten this, but McCain's campaign took off at the precise moment when his stump speech turned up the heat on Clinton and Gore and their lack of integrity in ways Bush seemed afraid to do. One of the risks, of course, is that like McCain, Dean will turn his anger against his own party (we've seen the beginnings of this with his sniping at Kerry and now Lieberman; wait and see if he goes after the DLC the way McCain went after social conservatives).

Ever seen Dean try to smile? It's frightening (Jon Stewart did a good bit on this last night). And everything I've read about Dean's career as Vermont governor backs up the idea that bristling anger is his default mode and not just some act for the benefit of the primaries.

9. Dennis Kucinich. Nothing spoils a good beer like a stern lecture about how our society cruelly oppresses hops and barley.

For years now, libertarians have been promising us that they have a better way, superior to the two major parties. The blogosphere in particular is home to many, many well-known self-identified libertarians. And the Libertarian Party keeps telling us things like, "Don't be a sellout, vote your principles."

But all of this can be advocated from the safety of the sidelines, as true libertarians -- as opposed to libertarian-leaning Republicans -- are rarely in any danger of assuming substantial public office. No longer. Because we now have the ideal situation brewing in California for a libertarian to assume the governorship of the nation's largest state, one that's suffering terribly from an addiction to Big Government, and prove that a libertarian can actually govern.

The recall in California, especially if there's a crowded ballot, will present the ideal conditions for a third-party run: a candidate with a well-honed message could win the race with just 15-20% of the vote. The Democrats have yet to put a major, big-name alternative candidate on the ballot, and the Republicans may split the vote between conservatives like Bill Simon and more liberal GOP candidates like Richard Riordan (it remains to be seen if Ah-nold will jump into the race this week, but if he doesn't, the field remains more open).

The Republican dilemma in California has, for some time, been based on two problems. First, the GOP's social conservatism, on issues like abortion, has been a major handicap; pro-lifers may be popular in most of the country, but not California. Second, lingering bitterness over Proposition 187 and other divisive issues -- some of it unfairly, but for these purposes that's beside the point -- has made it nearly impossible for the GOP to reach not only the ever-growing Latino community, but many moderate white and Asian-American voters as well, who have bought into the Davis machine's rhetoric about the "right-wing" menace.

A libertarian candidate could overcome these obstacles. There'd be other problems, of course: You'd need to pick just one candidate; you'd need someone who's got some name recognition from business, show biz or some other field; you'd probably need a candidate who could fund much of his or her candidacy, in the absence of an established libertarian fundraising network.

And you'd have to be practical. Instead of calling for repeal of the drug laws, focus more narrowly on fighting the Justice Department's position on medical marijuana and advocate more limited reductions in some drug laws and penalties. Offer other ways to cut back government that go deeper than GOP remedies without getting locked into debates about privatizing the fire department. A libertarian would have the burden of proving that he or she could actually go to Sacramento and get something done.

But if it can't be done in California now -- when the state Democrats are thoroughly discredited, the GOP is divided and not entirely innocent of the whole mess, and the electorate is irate -- it can't be done. It's the libertarians' moment -- will they take it?

I chuckled when USAToday's headline after Bush's press conference was "President Defines Marriage". Imagine that headline for his predecessor.

Byron York has the scoop over at NRO: that nutty Berkeley study about how conservatism is a form of mental illness (1) was heavily underwritten by you and I and (2) relied heavily for its governing assumptions about today's Republicans on -- I swear I am not making this up -- that noted scholar of conservatism, Paul Krugman's columns in the New York Times.

It never ends.

The lefty side of the blogosphere -- and the media -- has done a good bit of hyperventilating about the charge that radio congolmerate Clear Channel Communications supposedly ordered a nationwide ban on playing the Dixie Chicks on the radio, depite the company's denials. Washington Post media critic Tom Shales charged that "Clear Channel stations led a ridiculous national campaign to smear the musical group the Dixie Chicks after one of its members insulted President Bush. The group's songs were banned on its stations for a time." Paul Krugman stopped just short of pinning this on Clear Channel, but some left-wing news outlets have pushed the story. The argument goes that the network's reach shows the evil of media concentration, and Clear Channel has been Exhibit A in the case against FCC deregulation of media ownership.

I hadn't followed this story all that carefully, but then I stumbled accross an interesting fact. You know what company is the promoter of the Dixie Chicks' current concert tour?

That's right: Clear Channel Entertainment.

This isn't exactly a secret; Clear Channel has touted the success of the Chicks' tour to the business press, and you can go to the company's website to buy tickets to their shows.

Moral: maybe you should distrust what you hear on the radio, but don't believe everything you read, either.

Via The Corner, conservative opponents of Ward Connerly's Racial Privacy Initiative raise an issue that I aired as early as last September: that, if passed, it would hobble efforts to expose racial preference programs that produce the kind of massive disparities (with preferred groups having many, many times better chances of admission) that were on display in the Michigan cases. Also, Kevin Drum has news that the initiative might get pushed up to this November to be on the ballot with the recall election.

Politically, I suspect that this will greatly hurt the chances of a Republican succeeding Gray Davis, by bringing out larger African-American turnout (Mickey Kaus also thinks those voters will help Davis, but I'm not so sure). But there's also a flip side: by taking Connerly's initiative off the March ballot, you (a) improve its chances of passing (March will be Democratic presidential primary time) but possibly (b) depress turnout for the presidential primary (I'm not sure how that cuts, but fewer African-American and Latino voters is probably good news for Howard Dean, whose supporters are decidedly upscale and white).

Just another day for the front page of the New York Times: an article on the recall in California quotes numerous Democrats griping about democracy "run amok," the difficulties of dealing with initiatives, and calling the recall supporters "right wing" before it gets to quoting a lone Republican, who is quoted describing himself as a "wacko." The article also quotes unnamed "experts" (presented without rebuttal) supporting the Lieutenant Governor's strange theory that he doesn't need to let the voters pick a replacement for Gray Davis but can just step in himself.

Then there's the front page article on the shooting at City Hall, which conspicuously omits the fact that the shooter and the victim were both Democrats. (The article also ignores the fact that both men -- as well as the hero cop who killed the assailant with five direct hits from 45 feet away -- were African-American, although I can't fault the Times for being color-blind for once).

Sometimes, Bill Clinton's need to be a part of every story has some good results; Clinton tells Larry King that he feels George W.'s pain over the Niger issue:

"I thought the White House did the right thing in just saying 'we probably shouldn't have said that,'" Clinton told CNN's Larry King in a phone interview Tuesday evening.

"You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president. You can't make as many calls as you have to make without messing up. The thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do now."

The Weekly Standard has a great interview on Dennis Miller's journey to conservatism; Miller has too many great lines to excerpt here. A sampling:

I knew [John] Kerry was going to have to run for president because his features are so chiseled, his actual skull could be on Mt. Rushmore. The guy looks like an Easter Island statue in a power tie. Howard Dean can roll up his sleeves in public all he wants, but as long as you can see that heart tattoo with Neville Chamberlain's name on his right forearm, he's never going to get off the pad. I hope they send Howard Dean out to do battle with Bush because he'll get his ass handed to him quicker than someone who just got out of liposuction surgery.

(Link via Jane Galt)

With the (forced) retirement of Cynthia McKinney, the title of "worst member of Congress" is up for grabs. I nominate Fortney "Pete" Stark, who cemented his reputation last week by calling Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas a c___sucker, repeatedly calling Congressman Scott McInnis a "fruitcake" and challenging him to a fight, and generally acting in a sufficiently threatening manner that Thomas (probably overreacting to the situation) called the Capitol Police.

(FOX News, by the way, says that McInnis "is married and by all accounts not gay.").

It turns out that Stark has an incredibly long history of picking up the nastiest slur handy for whomever is in his way:

Stark has a long history of making outrageous remarks. He once called Republican Rep. Nancy Johnson "a whore," and said former Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan is "a disgrace to his race."

Sullivan, wisely, responded, “I don’t live on Pete Stark’s plantation.”. But wait, there's more:

+In 2001, Stark "called the Bush budget 'the embodiment of the anti-Christ,' saying that it was 'infamy' to use the Easter season to release a budget 'that flies in the face of all Christ's teachings.'"

+Later that year, he "falsely accused House Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts of having children who 'were all born out of wedlock.'," and The Washington Times recounted more history: "Mr. Stark is something of a legend in the House for making offensive remarks. He has accused Rep. Nancy L. Johnson, Connecticut Republican, of learning about health care from 'pillow talk' with her husband, a doctor. In 1991 he blamed 'Jewish colleagues' for supporting the Persian Gulf war and called Rep. Stephen Solarz, New York Democrat, as 'Field Marshal Solarz in the pro-Israel forces.'"

+Earlier this year, Stark argued that any U.S. bombing in or around Baghdad would be "an act of extreme terrorism."

George Will also had some fun with Stark's excesses during the Iraq debate:

During the House debate on authorizing the use of force against Iraq, Rep. Pete Stark, a paleo-liberal from northern California, cried, ``Rich kids will not pay; their daddies will get them deferments." He meant draft deferments. It is almost unkind to awaken Stark from his dogmatic slumbers to notify him that there has not been a draft since 1973. And the Beatles have broken up.

Where exactly is Stark's district? Gee, I'll give you one guess -- "the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay"

I know he's not in the leadership, but there comes a point when even a back-bencher merits some sort of rebuke from his party. This guy's a disgrace.

Bush is losing ground in the polls in California. This underlines two things:

1. As I've been saying for some time, Bush has a better shot of reviving in NY (where the war on terror is especially close to home) than in CA. I'll believe a Republican winning in California when I see it.

2. Bush has nothing to lose from a recall of Gray Davis, and much to gain; if things just fester in California, voters won't be itching to reward any incumbents.

On a related note, CalPundit (actually doing some California punditry in a break from his all-Niger routine) has a hilarious story of Democrats plotting to force a budget impasse in California for partisan advantage-- in front of an open mike.

Just imagine if Newt Gingrich got caught saying some of the stuff in this article.

No, not on the Republican side; Washington Governor Gary Locke, who delivered the Democratic response, has decided not to run for reelection, citing the desire to spend time with his family. You'll recall my vigorous fisking of Locke's response at the time. I guess I won't have Gary Locke to kick around anymore.

Teachers in Lowell, Massachusetts are outraged that they are being required to speak English as a condition of employment. The horror!

Starting here and scrolling down, you can catch some of Howard Dean's blog entries as guest blogger last week at Prof. Lawrence Lessig's blog. First of all, a nonpartisan hat's off to Dean; while most presidential candidates are too busy to do a running blog, it's a great way to showcase a candidate early in the race if it's taken seriously, and Dean appears to have tried to be genuinely responsive to feedback.

But then there's the substance of these posts. Where to begin?

People asked what can be done about media deregulation. I think we need to re-regulate the media that has clearly abused its authority by censoring information that should be made available to the American people.

OK, let's get this straight . . . Dean wants to use government regulation to punish media outlets for their editorial decisions? So much for Mister Civil Liberties Man. Can you say, "Hugo Chavez" or "Vladimir Putin," boys and girls?

Someone asked about the Patriot Act-we should repeal those parts that violate our constitution.

Well, it's good to see that Dean understands that we should repeal things that are unconstitutional, whereas our current president has been known to sign things into law (ahem, McCain-Feingold) that he thinks are unconstitutional, and leave the courts to do the dirty work. But I don't necessarily agree with Dean's selections:

I have real problems authorizing the FBI to obtain library and bookstore and video store records simply by claiming the information is “sought for” an investigation against international terrorism. It’s also clearly unconstitutional to detain indivduals and deny them access to a lawyer.

Frankly, the library thing just doesn't bother me that much. And it isn't "clearly unconstitutional" to deny counsel to non-citizens or to combatants in a war.

I believe that the only way we are ever going to come to a real solution on any of these issues is if we all stand together against the special interests in Washington. There are now 33 lobbyists for every member of congress. How do we change that? By working together.

Actually, working together is precisely how you attract lobbyists, who love the smell of bipartisanship in the morning. The only known way to get rid of lobbyists is to get the power over their interests out of Washington.

Facts are a better basis for decisions than ideology.

Ah, "competence, not ideology." Where have we heard that one before?

Matt Welch compares the media to the dumb baseball owners who get mocked by the sabermetric crowd. You could extend the analogy and say the NY Times is the Mets in this picture, wasting its prime position in the op-ed market by overpaying for a bunch of untalented or over-the-hill columnists (Dowd, Herbert, The Krug, Safire) and ignoring the vast pool of cheaper or free talent out there (even on the Left). (Or maybe I just like comparing Krugman to Mo Vaughn). Seriously, wouldn't you rather read 2 columns a week apiece from a selection of good bloggers like Kevin Drum or Megan McArdle and less-nationally-known columnists like Josh Marshall, Mark Steyn or Lileks than 3 a week from Dowd and The Krug? You could easily replace the whole slate, keep the page as a liberal page with 1 or 2 conservatives/libertarians/other non-liberals, and vastly improve the quality (even some of Krugman's fans think he's better suited to a weekly magazine piece on economics than 3 hack jobs a week).

But that would be the smart thing to do.

One thing that's worried me for some time about Bush's ability to get the economy moving again -- both long-term for the national good and short-term for the 2004 election -- is the fact that something like 1/6 of the economy is California, which remains under the hammerlock of the Democratic Party more than any state in the nation (Dem governor, Dems control both houses of the state legislature, Dem state AG, two Dem Senators, Dems dominate the Congressional delegation, etc.). And what a party it is: a governor who's unprincipled and almost universally unpopular riding herd over a state party dominated by the hard cultural Left and the rent-seeking special interest groups (government employee unions, the plaintiffs' bar, etc. -- government by the people who make a living off of government). The result is a $38.6 billion budget deficit, a spiral of downgrading of California's bonds, and a basket case of a state economy. (While the California GOP isn't innocent of all this, they've been too powerless too long to bear much of the responsibility. But if you want to blame Pete Wilson -- the man who did more for the Democratic party in the last 15 years than anyone else -- go ahead).

Part of the problem, and one that reaches outside of California, is litigation and regulation run amok. For example, even Steven Breyer recently recognized that California has gone too far in handing over regulatory powers to the plaintiffs' bar and that "[a]s far as I can tell, California’s delegation of the government’s enforcement authority to private individuals is not traditional, and may be unique . . . "

Mark Steyn recently noted that the May employment figures showed a net gain of 4,500 jobs for the other 49 states -- but a 21,500 job loss in California. I'd be fascinated to see a deeper analysis to show exactly how much of the nation's lingering economic hangover is concentrated in the one place where the writ of conservative economic policies barely runs.

If this keeps up, look for the Democrats to blame Bush's national policies for their own local problems. Maybe that's why Bush wants Davis to stay on -- so he can point to the source of the problem and say that things aren't so bad anywhere else. But to my view, this is reason enough to support a recall: the rest of the nation can't afford Gray Davis anymore.

My comments, July 10:

"I guess the "Soysage" backers at PETA are saying they knew the Milwaukee Sausage Race would lead to violence some day ("Now you see the violence inherent in the system!")"

PETA Press Release, July 10:

"Now, PETA recommends that, in order to set a nonviolent example to offset the recent brawls and 'beanings' in MLB, the Brewers should field a Sausage Race participant that does not represent the violence inherent in meat production"

Ricky West has some thoughts comparing Warren Buffett's anti-tax-cut social justice rhetoric to the reality of Berkshire Hathaway's treatment of its employees. Of course, Buffett has a duties to the other Berkshire Hathaway shareholders to maximize their profits rather than pay unnecessarily high salaries; he has to let the other shareholders decide for themselves how much money they want to devote to giving their fellow man a better deal than the market demands.

But then, shouldn't that also be true of George W. Bush?

This story from a few weeks back is simultaneously amusing, humbling and a little depressing about how little attention the average American pays to inside-the-Beltway power plays: a Democratic pollster not only finds that 61% of Latino voters are unaware of President Bush's nomination of Miguel Estrada for the DC Circuit, but concludes that

it was clear many of those who supported Mr. Estrada were also confusing him with actor Erik Estrada, who was on the 1977-1983 television police drama "CHiPS" and is now a popular Spanish-language soap-opera star.
"Many of them think President Bush nominated Erik Estrada — I'd say a good third think that way," Mr. Bendixen said, adding that he heard one person say Mr. Estrada should be confirmed because he did such a good job playing a policeman on "CHiPS."

Hey, anybody who can talk his partner out of giving a traffic ticket to H.R. Puffenstuf is ready for the D.C. Circuit . . .

Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal draws a parallel I've often drawn myself, calling Ann Coulter "the Maureen Dowd of the conservatives."

As a New Hampshirite, Mark Steyn has had the opportunity to watch Howard Dean up close for the past decade. To no one's surprise, he's unimpressed:

Vermont . . . was colonised in the Sixties by ponytailed granola progressivism and summed up by a remarkably prescient 1972 article in Playboy, headlined 'Take Over Vermont': 'Get 225,000 counterculturalists to settle in the Green Mountain State and exercise their franchise -- and you've begun a unique social experiment.' Or more to the point: just because these ideas are a surefire vote-loser everywhere across the country doesn't mean they won't catch on if enough of the tiny minority that believes in them moves to one small underpopulated jurisdiction.

So 30 years on, the unique social experiment is almost complete, and Howard Dean's state is not terribly friendly to any kind of business other than folksy boutique capitalism as represented by the Vermont Teddy Bear Company and Ben & Jerry's, the hippy-dippy ice-cream-makers who sell 'Peace Pops' in flavours like 'Cherry Garcia'. And even these most famous exemplars of the Green Mountain State's caring capitalism flopped out. A couple of years ago, Ben & Jerry's got taken over by Unilever, even though one of them - Ben or possibly Jerry - wasn't too happy about it. But the one who was - Jerry or maybe Ben - insists that UniBen or Jerrylever or whatever it's called now is still just the same bunch of committed activists raging at the greed of multinational globalised capitalism, even though they're now a wholly owned subsidiary thereof. . . . In other words, Ben & Jerry's are full of it. And so's Howard Dean. In Ben & Jerry terms, he's a thousand pints of Lite, a masterful Clintonian triangulator who's taken the but-I-didn't-inhale approach to political viability into far more ambitious territory. Although he did part of his medical training at an abortion clinic, he's always claimed he never actually performed one himself: he may have dilated, but he never extracted. Hardcore Vermont liberals - especially the environmentalists - got sick of Dean's slipperiness long before he decided to run for president.

But out of state the activists don't know that, and in a field split between five lacklustre Congressional compromisers . . . and three fringe wackos . . . , Dean's done a superb job at positioning himself as the heart of the party. . . . The reason he's piling up all the big money from out of state boils down to two words: civil unions. Three years ago, Vermont became the first state in the nation to recognise a form of legal union for same-sex couples, and that puts Dean on the cutting edge of the issue du jour. . . . Dean now says bringing civil unions to Vermont was 'the most important event in my political life'. At the time, he was going round the state telling folks he was only doing it because the Vermont Supreme Court made him, and, instead of the usual showboating public ceremony, he signed the legislation behind closed doors. But out in Hollywood all Barbra Streisand and the other high rollers know is that, if gay marriage is your big priority rather than Iraq and national security and all the other peripheral junk, then Dean's your man. In a way, he's the first gay candidate, the first beneficiary of a prominent, organisationally effective, big-money gay bloc in the Democratic party. This year, gay is the new black.

* * *
I'd say the south will be a bridge too far for Dean and the Vermontification of the Democratic party. In electoral terms, Vermont is a polarising state. It's the Hillary Rodham Clinton of states. . . . As for the man with the plain-spoken candour of John McCain and the electability of Bill Clinton, before it's over it'll be looking more like the electability of John McCain and the plain-spoken candour of Bill Clinton.

Speaking of Hillary, one of the common lines from Bill's defenders (like Sid Blumenthal) is that hatred of Bill Clinton was all about his "progressive" politics; meanwhile, Hillary's defenders often argue that people who hate Hillary "have a problem with strong women" or some such. Talk to a lot of dyed-in-the-wool Clinton-haters (I've mislaid my card, but it's around here somewhere), and you'll quickly realize that the psychoanalysts on the Left have it precisely backward. The people who hate Bill hate him, first and foremost, for his character; talk to them about another "New Democrat" like John Edwards or Joe Lieberman, and you won't hit anywhere near the same vein of animosity that accompanied Bill from the very beginning. The problem with Bill is a problem we all have with that one guy we know who can get away with damn near everything, and with the way in which he symbolized all the worst aspects of a generation that was, as it so happened, second to none in its generational self-image.

As for Hillary, there are certainly plenty of people -- even liberals -- who hate her for her personality, but few of them focus on her as an abstract generalization. The real core of Hillary-hating relates to her politics more than her character; people didn't hate her for trying to be Lee Hart to Bill's Gary; they hated her from the outset out of fear that she was disguising her perceived role as the voice of the Left in Bill's ear.

I overgeneralize, of course; my own least favorite fact about Hillary is her tendency, and that of her defenders, to recast every criticism of this emeninently criticizable public figure as being an Attack On All Women -- she's effectively tried to hijack the sympathies of an entire gender, which is one reason why the depth of Hillary-hatred among men is childs' play compared to the way some women (not all of them conservatives) hate her. But the generalization, I submit, is true: people first came to hate Bill mostly for his character, and Hillary mostly for her politics.

THIS is a must-read -- PJ O'Rourke's review of Living History is good enough to make you forget that the Weekly Standard already had Matt Labash write a savage review of this book:

There's "the trip to Russia when Hillary and Mrs. Boris Yeltsin 'laughed our way through a day of public appearances and private meals with local dignitaries.' I hesitate to think there was a logical explanation, but Hillary does say, 'Ireland invigorated and inspired me, and I wished we could bottle up the good feelings and take them back home.' It's been done before."

"We must recognize Hillary's principled outspoken feminism as elucidated in her U.N. Conference on Women speech: 'It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.' . . . And understand her stupidity. Now, Hillary's stupidity is of a Monday's-homework-done-on-Friday-night, 1,400 on her SATs kind, but nonetheless stupid for all that. She has lunch with Jackie Onassis, who 'cautioned me that Bill, like President Kennedy, had a personal magnetism that inspired strong feelings in people. She never came out and said it, but she meant that he might be a target.' Was Jackie talking about the grassy knoll or about a different kind of mons?

Hillary serves roasted eggplant soup and sweet potato puree to Jacques Chirac and doesn't get the joke when Chirac says, 'Of course, I love many things American, including the food. You know, I used to work in a Howard Johnson's restaurant.' After listening to Jiang Zemin explain that the Tibetans had been liberated by the Chinese, Hillary concludes, 'I don't think Jiang . . . was being quite straight with me on Tibet.'"

O'Rourke's vicious conclusion:

"[I]t says something unflattering about our era that prominent political figures--who used to write declarations of independence, preambles to constitutions, Gettysburg addresses, and such--now use the alphabet only to make primitive artifacts, like the letter-inscribed tablet that Charlemagne is said to have put under his pillow each night, in the hope he'd wake up literate."

(Link via The American Scene).

From Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus on NRO:

In a previous Impromptus, I wrote of Kathy Boudin, the Weather bomber and Brinks murderess who's always up for parole. At her latest hearing, she talked about how guilty she'd felt that she was white. (You remember: "white skin privilege.") I said what she ought to feel guilty about is killing people - including Waverly Brown, the first black police officer on the Nyack, N.Y., force. It took forever to get him there. And then Kathy and her friends took him away.

Anyway, my homegirl Michelle Malkin wrote me to say that a scholarship fund had been established in his name, along with that of Edward O'Grady, another officer murdered by the Boudin crew. Money goes to students who pursue careers in law enforcement. Checks can be made payable to: O'Grady-Brown Memorial Scholarship Fund, Inc., P.O. Box 1024, Nyack, N.Y. 10960.

As MM says, "Fight left-wing domestic terrorism. Send your check today."

I grew up in Rockland County, NY (Nyack was a few towns over), and I can remember how the Brinks story dominated the news. When I worked in the Rockland DA's Office my first summer during law school, they took us to an exhibit on the Brinks case in the Rockland County Sherriff's Office. One exhibit that made a particular impression was the front winshield of the armored car -- it must have been several inches thick -- with a hole blown in the glass more than six inches in diameter from machine gun fire. The armored car drivers and the cops killed in this incident never had a chance.

If you're inclined to waste your time on Sidney Blumenthal and Whitewater, this is an amusing battle in which Blumenthal accuses the New York Times of being part of a right-wing attack machine (re-read that carefully, I'm not kidding), mostly on grounds that the Times reported Whitewater at all (in March 1992) and then failed to report on various Whitewater developments later that purportedly cast the original article into doubt. Former editor and current interim editor Joseph Lelyveld responds by tearing Blumenthal's smoke-and-mirrors critique to pieces. (I noted Lelyveld's review of Blumenthal's book here).

Dick Morris, meanwhile, charges Lelyveld's Times with pro-Clinton bias on Whitewater, and as usual with Morris' charges, he himself is a prime conspirator. (Take anything Morris says with a grain of salt, although the evidence he cites of the puff piece he describes is certainly supportive.) Ironically, Morris and Blumenthal both cite the Times' non-reporting of Whitewater stories as indicative of bias.

The funny thing is how Clinton partisans try to attack the Times and investigative reporter Jeff Gerth for bringing Whitewater to light at all. Why is that so important? Well, because much of the Clintons' subsequent misbehavior in response to the investigation can only be justified if you start with the premise that there was nothing at all that should ever have been investigated.

Like Eugene Volokh, I can't see, legally, what will be accomplished by the motion filed by Norma McCorvey (aka Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade) attempting to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in Roe 30 years ago. But her affidavit still makes for some rather powerful reading.

This Washington Post profile of John Kerry, which opens with an account of him hunting, is obviously intended to show that he's a regular guy and not some ivory tower Massachusetts anti-gun nut.

This is just savage (and justifiably so) -- Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard, on the unreadable Hillary memoir:

Who else could seriously write of her grade-school appointment as "co-captain of the safety patrol" "This was a big deal in our school. My new status provided me my first lesson in the strange ways some people respond to electoral politics." . . . Every detail of her life is wrapped in a tidy little pre-package--containing all sorts of do-goodnik asides ready for a campaign bio or a stump-speech moral. Conceiving Chelsea? "We weren't having any luck," she writes, "until we decided to take a vacation in Bermuda, proving once again the importance of regular time off." Most people would just be happy to be having sex in Bermuda. She has to prove the importance of taking regular time off. Her delivery of Chelsea? An excellent opportunity to work in the factlet that Bill accompanied her into the operating room for her C-section--an "unprecedented" move at Baptist Hospital, though "soon thereafter the policy was changed to permit fathers in the delivery room during cesarean operations."

A hike through Yellowstone with Chelsea and Bill? "America's national parks have provided a model and an inspiration for other nations to protect their national heritage," and oh, by the way, she almost forgot to mention: "Bill announced a historic agreement to stop a large, foreign-owned gold mine on the border of Yellowstone from threatening the pristine environment." Vince Foster, one of Hillary's best friends in the world, committing suicide? She interrupts news of his death to tell us that right before she was notified, she'd been on a trip to Japan, where she "met with a group of prominent Japanese women--the first of dozens of such meetings that I held around the world--to learn about the issues women were facing everywhere."

Even when Hillary is going through her lowest moments, she manages to find a sanctimonious silver lining. . . . Remember the Rose law firm billing records that turned up in a White House closet months after they were subpoenaed by prosecutors? They got lost in the shuffle when "we found ourselves in the midst of a major renovation of the heating and air-conditioning systems to bring the White House up to environmental energy standards."

Even the failure to stop genocide can be turned to political advantage. The death of one million Rwandans which the administration did nothing to stop? "It would have been difficult for the United States to send troops so soon after the loss of American soldiers in Somalia and when the Administration was trying to end ethnic cleansing in Bosnia," she explains. "But Bill publicly expressed regret that our country and the international community had not done more to stop the horror." Public regret? How do you say "thanks for nothing" in Tutsi?

For a good laugh, go to Democrats.org, click on "Supreme Court Countdown" New Flash Animation about half way down the page toward the right.

This is really, really going to get ugly, considering how nasty this stuff is before Bush has even announced a Supreme Court pick. Much uglier than the partisan smear campaigns against Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer (oh, wait . . . ). The funny thing is how the Democrats may be arguing that a Supreme nomineee is a right-wing lunatic compared to Rehnquist. I bet the Chief Justice gets his reputation rehabilitated in one heck of a hurry if he steps down.

For a good laugh, go to Democrats.org, click on "Supreme Court Countdown" New Flash Animation about half way down the page toward the right.

This is really, really going to get ugly, considering how nasty this stuff is before Bush has even announced a Supreme Court pick. Much uglier than the partisan smear campaigns against Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer (oh, wait . . . ). The funny thing is how the Democrats may be arguing that a Supreme nomineee is a right-wing lunatic compared to Rehnquist. I bet the Chief Justice gets his reputation rehabilitated in one heck of a hurry if he steps down.

Let's face it: there's really nothing the Democrats can do to defeat George W. Bush in 2004. Which is not to say he can't be beaten, just that what can do him in is mostly a combination of external circumstances (the economy, setbacks in the war) and missteps by the Administration. The only Democrat I'd feared in terms of his ability to create his own buzz independent of pre-existing anti-Bush sentiment was John Edwards, but Edwards increasingly looks like just a pretty face who's in over his head.

Rand Simberg notes the more interesting question, one that the Democrats have to think long and hard about: how will the presidential ticket affect the rest of the ticket, in terms of turning out the Democratic base without turning off the mainstream? Among other things, this is one reason I'm not excited about the idea that Al Sharpton could run an independent campaign: who do you think Sharpton's voters will support for Congress?

I suspect, contrary to Simberg's speculation, that a far-Left candidacy like Howard Dean's would be a bad thing for the Dems, since it could convince a lot of voters that the party has lost its mind, and put a lot of moderate candidates in the same bind that swallowed so many moderate Senators in 2002. I'll have more thoughts as we go about what the best answer is.

Of course, if you wanted to design a perfect candidate to challenge Bush, you'd want someone who could pose as a moderate; who had impeccable national-security credentials; who's got a long record as a spending hawk; and who is personally identified with opposing the cozy relationship of big money to power in Washington.

Then again, we've seen that perfect candidate already, and he lost to Bush in the primaries in 2000.

Lileks compares Bill O'Reilly to Morton Downey jr. (if you don't remember the late 80s, let's just say that Downey was the original right-wing TV populist, and he smoked like a chimney). Vodkapundit still thinks Pat Buchanan is a better analogy. I tend to agree with Lileks that O'Reilly's the classic example of a guy who rises, and falls, for a reason. If he's lucky, like Rush Limbaugh, he'll survive passing his prime without crashing and burning like Downey.

Patrick Ruffini notes the irony in a rather egregious example from John Edwards of what, if said by a Republican, would almost certainly be a career-threatening racial slur: the charge that Miguel Estrada is unqualified to be a federal appeals judge, and was nominated just for his ethnicity:

"I think we need more Hispanics on the federal bench, but we should choose people because they have the right record, not just the right last name"

I know Bush hates demonizing his opponents, but somebody needs to very publicly tear Edwards a new one over this comment. As Ruffini notes, the real irony is that Edwards is the one who's painfully short on qualifications (to be president, that is). Estrada has a resume to die for, and is, if anything, overqualified; every job he's had is an extremely hard one to get in the legal world, and he's done them all with great distinction. But apparently it's OK to run down those qualifications because he's Latino.

I've been slow to consider the Democrats' behavior in this case to be racist or a genuine problem with Latino voters -- I always thought it was completely bogus for Clinton to play the race card every time one of his African-American nominees got held up -- but there's no question in my mind that Estrada has been targeted (in ways that other equally conservative white male nominees haven't) specifically because the Democrats fear that his nationality and life history, combined with his evident brilliance, would make him a potent Supreme Court choice.

Targeting a man for defeat to public office because of his race -- isn't that the sort of thing Democrats were supposed to be against? (Don't bother answering that).

(Link via The Corner).

Gearing up for the 2004 election, this weekend's newspapers have a slew of articles providing background information on presidential candidates: the Boston Globe on local favorite, John Kerry; the Washington Post on Joe Lieberman ; and the NYTimes on a potential GOP candidate in 2008, George Pataki. Note that, for the Democrats, 2004 may be the year of John Kennedy -- both Lieberman and Kerry are claiming a connection to JFK.

From Will Saletan at Slate:

Correction: In Monday's "Ballot Box," referring to presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, I wrote, "Somebody toss a dollar in his guitar case so he can buy a quart of milk." Kucinich, a vegan, does not drink milk.

I see that Chuck Schumer has suggested that Bush appoint 73-year-old pro-abortion Republican Arlen Specter to the Supreme Court, which would let Democratic Ed Rendell pick his immediate replacement. Nice try, Chuck.

A piece in last Sunday's New York Times had some fascinating details about the decline in the number of hours worked by the average European, its connection to the decline of the European economies, and a possible explanation: the demise of the Protestant Work Ethic. Of course, this raises some chicken-and-eggery with regard to the European cradle-to-grave welfare state . . .

Here are the key numbers:

According to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average working American spends 1,976 hours a year on the job. The average German works just 1,535 — 22 percent less. The Dutch and Norwegians put in even fewer hours. Even the British do 10 percent less work than their trans-Atlantic cousins. Between 1979 and 1999, the average American working year lengthened by 50 hours, or nearly 3 percent. But the average German working year shrank by 12 percent.

Yet even these figures understate the extent of European idleness, because a larger proportion of Americans work. Between 1973 and 1998 the percentage of the American population in employment rose from 41 percent to 49 percent. But in Germany and France the percentage fell, ending up at 44 and 39 percent. Unemployment rates in most Northern European countries are also markedly higher than in the United States.

Then there are the strikes. Between 1992 and 2001, the Spanish economy lost, on average, 271 days per 1,000 employees as a result of strikes. For Denmark, Italy, Finland, Ireland and France, the figures range between 80 and 120 days, compared with fewer than 50 for the United States.

1,535 hours; by my count, that means that if the average German worked an 8-hour day 5 days a week, he or she would get . . . 14 weeks of vacation??? (Yes, I'm aware that part of the issue is shorter workdays and sick leave and part time jobs, but still).

Ann Coulter is your classic preaching-to-the-choir polemicist, a columnist who bypasses argument and goes straight to the invective (much like the New York Times' Maureen Dowd). Coulter can be very entertaining sometimes when she's locked on a deserving target, but she's justifiably viewed with some suspicion both for her rhetorical excesses and her sometimes cavalier attitude towards fairly and accurately presenting the facts.

Her recent and much-discussed expose of professional "man on the street" Greg Packer, though, is just good journalism:

Another average individual eager to get Hillary's book was Greg Packer, who was the centerpiece of the New York Times' "man on the street" interview about Hillary-mania. After being first in line for an autographed book at the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble, Packer gushed to the Times: "I'm a big fan of Hillary and Bill's. I want to change her mind about running for president. I want to be part of her campaign."

It was easy for the Times to spell Packer's name right because he is apparently the entire media's designated "man on the street" for all articles ever written. He has appeared in news stories more than 100 times as a random member of the public. Packer was quoted on his reaction to military strikes against Iraq; he was quoted at the St. Patrick's Day Parade, the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Veterans' Day Parade. He was quoted at not one – but two – New Year's Eve celebrations at Times Square. He was quoted at the opening of a new "Star Wars" movie, at the opening of an H&M clothing store on Fifth Avenue and at the opening of the viewing stand at Ground Zero. He has been quoted at Yankees games, Mets games, Jets games – even getting tickets for the Brooklyn Cyclones. He was quoted at a Clinton fund-raiser at Alec Baldwin's house in the Hamptons and the pope's visit to Giants stadium.

Are all reporters writing their stories from Jayson Blair's house?

(Mickey Kaus has more).

The Boston Globe has a story about a terrible idea at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School: "heterogeneous classrooms" mixing the best, worst and every other student in between in terms of ability, to cure the problem of "a pattern in which Cambridge's white students -- the minority in the school -- were succeeding while African-American and Hispanic students were falling farther behind."

Well, I'm sure they'll cure the first part . . . as one student puts it:

"The worst [teachers] are the ones who try to teach to the middle," says Lang. "Because there's no one there."

One of the joys of being a civil litigator is that my job gives me mechanisms to catch and expose lies by adversaries. To do that effectively, of course, you need to keep something of a 'grudge file' -- keep careful track of past statements in writing and orally (take good notes), and know when to pull it all out to expose flip-flops and outright whoppers. Sometimes you catch the other guy in an obvious one, and sometimes you just get to show some inconsistency.

Every now and then, though, you run across somebody who's such an exceptional and prolific liar that the job of keeping opposing counsel honest winds up all but overwhelming the actual litigating of the case -- the lies come in too fast and too varied, and require refutation that's too lengthy and detailed, to effectively rebut them all without the judge thinking you've gotten lost in some vendetta. After a while, this gets exhausting, and demoralizing.

This, basically, is how I feel about the Clintons at this point, particularly Hillary (Bill, thankfully, seems unlikely to wind up with any responsibility ever again). You need enormous reserves of energy to keep up with their serial deceptions; no matter how clearly you debunk something they or their defenders say, it pops back up a few years later and you need to go back to the file. And if you wade into a debate with their bitter-ender supporters, you need to go back to the grudge file to keep straight all the various charges (which is not to say everything pinned on the Clintons was true, but there's plenty enough there) or get accused of being some sort of fraud; if you do keep it all straight, they say you're obsessed and living in the past.

At least with litigation, I get paid to do this; I don't get paid to keep a grudge file on the Clintons, and I refuse to spend the time necessary to revisit again all those controversies. But I'm glad there are professionals out there who haven't forgotten. As for me, and I think a lot of conservatives, I just wish the Clintons would go away.

Byron York had a funny story last week about the Democrats' willingness to put their stock in Clinton-bashing Larry Klayman's Judicial Watch just to tar a GOP judicial nominee.

I've decided that Bob Graham is the Orrin Hatch of 2004. You remember Hatch - almost certainly the most qualified of the GOP presidential contenders in 2000, a distinguished and dignified senator of longstanding who spent his entire campaign mounting increasingly harsh attacks on Bill Clinton. Granted, they were justified, and I was certainly one of the people who argued at the time that a tougher line on the Clinton-Gore camp was a prerequsite to the job. But Hatch wound up expending some of his good will with the press for the benefit of a marginal campaign. (Jay Nordlinger takes a similar view).

You may recall Kevin Drum's plea of a few weeks ago for "liberal cranks like [conservative Richard Mellon] Scaife willing to fund liberal think tanks?" Well, leaving aside the Sulzbergers, one such liberal crank has been thoroughly investigated by Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard: Bill Moyers. In fact, typically, Moyers does Scaife one better: he not only funds left-wing causes and conspiracy theories, he also showers them with taxpayer-funded publicity.

(I noted the last round of Hayes' battle with Moyers here).

Don Regan has died at the age of 84; Regan was a colorful character, although as with a lot of Reagan-era figures besides the President himself, I wasn't really old enough at the time to judge the man independently of his caricatures in the press.

Regan took up painting in his retirement:

"After Wall Street and the government, I decided there had to be more to
life than the stock market, golf and drinking," he said in explaining his
new passion for landscape painting.

Stuart Buck wonders why the Democrats are sending up signals that they intend to pitch a bitter battle over Supreme Court nominees no matter who Bush nominates. There's an important point here: if Bush is convinced that he faces a massive battle no matter who he puts up, then his only incentive to pick a more 'moderate' candidate is if he faces defections from Republicans. The Dems certainly give no reason to suspect that they will give Bush any credit no matter what he does.

An amusing correction: somebody evidently bothered to write in to Slate to correct the misimpression that NY Times reporter James Bennet was a friend of Sidney Blumenthal. I don't think I've ever seen a correction before that denied a friendship.

Lately I've been thinking that the one good thing about Hillary! and her presidential ambitions is that it would keep Bill from campaigning for a repeal of the 22d Amendment.

Naturally, I was wrong.

I'm actually not opposed, in principle, to Clinton's proposal (changing the limits to two consecutive terms rather than two terms per lifetime). But still . . . I mean, please, just go away.

You may have seen some of these:

Andrew Sullivan: "The choice at the Times is between frauds and ideologues."

From the Ombudsgod: a link to Edward Jay Epstein with a battery of factually-challenged NY Times stories.

David Pinto on how the Times scandals are affecting the sports page.

Lileks:

"Yes, you can take some stringer's notes and compose a story, but the difference between that an[d] a piece you wrote from your own research is the difference between a Penthouse Forum letter and your recollection of your wedding night."

Not that he went anywhere, but a classic Jonah Goldberg column yesterday on the NY Times' latest attempt to determine whether young Republicans are actually human. Jonah's work has tended to be more serious lately, as befits the times; this one's more of the old G-File style of full-out mockery.

Josh Marshall, who's been hung up on redistricting in Texas lately, argues:

Many of those who are defending -- professionally or otherwise -- the DeLay power-grab are arguing that courts simply should not be involved in drawing congressional maps, period. . . . we have an established system and DeLay & Co are changing it . . . the courts-out-of-elections mantle hangs rather heavy on a crew whose president owes his office to a judicial ruling.

Hmmmm. Dr. Marshall's memory of Florida 2000 is rather selective indeed if he expects us to believe that Al Gore would have won Florida if only the courts hadn't gotten involved! For those who have forgotten: there was a long established practice in presidential races of respecting the Election Day outcome, even when (as was the case in 1960 but not in 2000) there were credible bases to believe there had been fraud by the winning party. It was the Bush camp that argued all along that the courts shouldn't be involved in picking presidents, and it was the Gore team that pushed at every turn for a larger role for the court system, including asking the courts to disregard express statutory language enacted by the Florida Legislature and to disregard rulings of the Florida Secretary of State, to whom substantial authority was delegated under the Florida statutes.

In a similar vein, Yale law professor Jack Balkin has been arguing on his blog lately that Democrats are justified in breaking down traditional barriers in another way -- by filibustering appellate court nominees on purely ideological grounds -- because of their anger over Bush v. Gore. Balkin makes the hypocrisy/inconsistency charge a centerpiece of his argument that

[t]he five conservatives were the least likely, one would think, to extend the Warren Court's equal protection doctrines in the area of voting rights. Indeed, one member of the majority, Justice Scalia, is on record as opposing novel interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause that undermine traditional state practices. It is hard to imagine that if the parties had been reversed-and Vice-President Gore had been ahead by 537 votes-the five conservatives would have been so eager to review the decisions of a Republican Florida Supreme Court that was trying to ensure that every vote had been counted. The unseemliness of Bush v. Gore stems from the overwhelming suspicion that the members of the five person majority were willing to make things up out of whole cloth-and, equally importantly, contrary to the ways that they usually innovated-in order to ensure a Republican victory . . . The Justices could have avoided the appearance of a conflict of interest by simply remaining out of the fray . . .

(emphasis added). The quotation is from a Virginia Law Review piece by Balkin and Prof. Sanford Levinson.

Of course, "traditional state practices" is precisely what was not at issue in Bush v. Gore; the central and inescapable fact about the case is that it involved the Court's review of a judicial remedy, one crafted after the election, without any statutory basis, without precedent in history, and without anything but arbitrary standards to guide its implementation. I've posted here my reaction to Bush v. Gore written the day after it was decided, and the more I read about the case, the more I stand by my initial gut reaction to the decision; here's the key excerpt:

"[T]he Court went out of its way to limit this to the facts at hand, and to show how the current system wasn't so much discriminatory as it was lacking in any rational basis. Far more to the point, as far as consistency with conservative principles is concerned, the Court made clear that its decision does not (at least on its face) apply to the conduct of elections generally ("The question before the Court is not whether local entities, in the exercise of their expertise, may develop different systems for implementing elections"). Rather, the Court's decision focuses in on, and arguably applies a higher standard for, judicial proceedings to review elections ("[W]e are presented with a situation where a state court with the power to assure uniformity has ordered a statewide recount with minimal procedural safeguards. When a court orders a statewide remedy, there must be at least some assurance that the rudimentary requirements of equal treatment and fundamental fairness are satisfied") (emphasis added). The net result is to counsel state as well as federal courts to be more circumspect in the future in ordering remedies in election cases where the remedy has not been explicitly set out in advance in a statute. It is this aspect of the decision that essentially constitutionalizes the James Baker Doctrine: you can't go to court to change the rules after the election."

In that sense, the Court's decision is deeply and profoundly conservative, and it is not surprising at all that the conservatives on the Court would have found the Florida court's approach so troubling, and so hazardous in its gravtitational pull of courts into what Balkin calls the "low politics" of partisan side-taking. By imposing a higher standard of scrutiny on post hoc judicial remedies in election cases, the Court has (admittedly, at some cost to its own short-term credibility with the public) erected a barrier to the use of courts, state or federal, in such adventures in "low politics" in the future.

As to the idea that the Justices could have "remain[ed] out of the fray" -- that's an awfully convenient bit of ledgermain, given that the matter had already been pushed into the court system. This is why I find it particularly laughable that some commentators have invoked the political question doctrine in this context: the doctrine says that some issues are just not suitable for courts to resolve. How can you apply that to say that courts can not review what are judicially crafted remedies in the first place?

What was clear to me at the time -- something that should have been familiar to any practicing litigator, though perhaps less so to a law professor -- was the extent to which the Court was reacting to the procedural posture of the case and the behavior of the court below.

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Reading the New York Observer's bizarre interview with Jayson Blair and its story on his quest to make money off his own misdeeds brought to mind a few points:

1. I had initially been deeply skeptical of why the U.S. Attorney's Office would get involved in something like this, where you'd think that Blair had been punished enough by being fired, publicly humiliated, and almost certainly never working in journalism again. Now, I'm not so sure; at a minimum, there's got to be a way to keep him from laughing all the way to the bank with the proceeds from a book based on his fraud.

2. Consider Blair's taunt: "I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism . . . They’re all so smart, but I was sitting right under their nose fooling them." Maybe Tim Blair's theory was right: "if I worked for the NY Times, I'd be tempted to destroy its credibility too. Here's to Jayson, the Evil Blair, bringing them down from the inside!."

3. An alternative and banal explanation for the federal prosecutors' interest in the case: Blair freely admits he was using cocaine. Let's say they drop the anvil of a big grand jury investigation on him over the fraud on the Times, then they start asking: hey, maybe you can tell us who your dealer was. A plausible explanation of the feds' motives? Maybe.

Christopher Hitchens' review of Sid Blumenthal's new book is now available online. Fortunately, adherents of the permanent campaign to the contrary, someone still remembers what the battles of that sorry era were all about. Hitchens details the extent to which Blumenthal has given himself over so thoroughly to Clinton that he is unable to even address many of the most inconvenient facts. My favorite passage:

I always thought that it was very clever of Clinton to make a mystery where none existed about when, and even where, he had touched Monica Lewinsky. Since his denial was made partly under oath, and involved a legalistic definition even of certain orifices and appendages, it necessitated a minute inquiry. And this allowed Clinton's defenders to paint his critics-his critics-as "obsessed with sex."

Or, as Glenn Reynolds would put it, oh, that liberal media: Michael Kinsley admits what conservatives have been complaining about for years: the vast influence of the New York Times in setting the agenda for news organizations everywhere, a position of "near-universal dependence" that gives the increasingly left-leaning Times power far beyond its own circulation:

[M]uch or even most American news reporting and commentary on national issues derives - uncredited - from the New York Times. . . Even if you don't read the Times yourself, you get your news from journalists at other media who do. The Times sets the news agenda that everyone else follows. The Washington Post and maybe one or two other papers also play this role, but even as a writer who appears in the Washington Post -- a damned fine newspaper run by superb editors who are graced with every kind of brilliance, charm, and physical beauty - I would have to concede that the Times is more influential. . . it is the imprimatur of the Times or the Post that stamps the story as important before sending it back down to other papers - as well as up to the media gods of television.

In fact, I would go so far as to cite both the Times' longstanding liberal slant and its influence on the national media agenda as Conservative Truth #2 in my continuing series.

Instapundit cites an article worrying about Bush's ability to motivate the conservative base. This is mostly bunk. The article cites conservative worries about the GOP's tepid efforts to cut spending and the growth of government, but this isn't nearly as important to the base voters as war, judges and taxes. Concerns about the judiciary are more significant, but I have no doubt that that issue will escalate as we grow closer to 2004, especially if one or more Supreme Court slots open up. And the idea that Bush's foreign policy is unpopular with the GOP base is just unhinged from reality.

Great G-File yesterday wrapping up a 3-part series on media misunderstanding and abuse of the term "neoconservative." Money quote: "Victory has many neocons, failure few - and all Jewish."

A lot of liberal bloggers have been trying to get Tacitus, their favorite conservative, to switch sides. In this excellent post, he explains why he can't and won't.

My own list would put the judiciary a clear second (behind national defense).

Christopher Caldwell, on Jayson Blair and the Times:

The Times has been drifting more and more towards front-page stories on trends and passions and tough-to-capture states of mind. This is what leads to all the talk about "resonating pain" and "acute hurt" and (as the Times puts it elsewhere in its Blair account) "emotionally charged moments." Some of these stories are backed up with polling numbers, some with a handful of sources speaking in the abstract. And many are excellent. But they do not stand and fall on facts and they are the farthest thing from all the news that's fit to print. They're the door through which Jayson Blair's devious idea of journalism entered the nation's greatest newspaper.

Following up further on my post on Conservative Truth #1 - that the results of government initiatives will inevitably be affected by how the initiative changes individual incentives - I couldn't have asked for a bettter illustration of how some purportedly mainstream liberals completely ignore this point than this op-ed piece in last Thursday's New York Times by Yale Economics Professor Robert J. Shiller. Shiller argues that inequalty of wealth is "truly frightening":

According to the Census Bureau, the bottom 40 percent of American families earned 18 percent of the national income in 1970, but by 1998 they earned only 14 percent — and that figure could fall to 10 percent before too long. On a global scale, too, inequality is a problem. Per capita gross domestic product in India in 2000 was only 7 percent of that of the United States, and for China the figure was 11 percent. Such a difference could increase the possibility of greater inequality within America.

(Note that he identifies America's wealth relative to other nations as a problem, which becomes more ominous when you examine his proposed solution). The "cure":

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I was debating whether to write more on the Jayson Blair affair. The bottom line: yes, as I've already explained, race was a legitimate story here even before Howell Raines admitted it, even though I don't think it was the only or necessarily even the main reason for the problem. This was clearly something of a perfect storm of blind spots at the Times (affirmative action, the "star" system, Blair's sucking up to top management, etc.), but two additional features of the modern workplace have attracted perhaps too little notice:

1. The union. Blair belonged to a guild with a collectively-bargained contract:

In April 2002, according to Raines, the Times issued Blair a formal warning saying that further errors "could lead to your separation." Raines notes that people on the outside have wondered why Blair wasn't fired at that point. However, says Raines, the Times' guild contract prohibits summary dismissal for anything short of plagiarism for personnel, like Blair, working in the "intermediate reporter" program.

I'm not totally against unions, which have important uses, but one of their worst features is the tendency to protect the incompetent and the corrupt from being fired.

2. The ADA culture. The Times' own exhaustive account (now archived - you can't read it online anymore) points in two directions on this. On the one hand, there's at least the implication that Blair may have had severe emotional problems and/or a drinking problem (note the passage that says Blair "was unavailable for long stretches" without further elaboration); it is left unexplored to what extent this was known and ignored. Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a company that knows an employee has such problems actually finds itself less able to discipline that employee for fear of legal liability, even when common sense says that the guy's problems getting the facts straight are probably not coincidental.

But here's the whopper: when Blair was assigned to the sniper case, under national editor Jim Roberts, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd - the men who run the Times

did not tell Mr. Roberts or his deputies about the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Blair's reporting. "that discussion did not happen," Mr. Raines said, adding that he had seen no need for such a discussion because Mr. Blair's performance had improved, and because "we do not stigmatize people for seeking help."

You see the problem: it's not just that Raines didn't tell Blair's new boss that he had personal problems, but that he didn't tell him about Blair's problems with the truth because it might lead to questions about his personal problems or somehow relate to his "seeking help." In other words, by seeking psychological help, Blair - just like many of the worst offenders in the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandals (an apt analogy made by many commentators) - was able to build a protective shield around his professional problems.

I could say more; but Lileks has the last word on two other loose ends from the Blair scandal.

From a review of Sid Blumenthal's new book by Joseph Lelyveld in the New York Review of Books, hardly a conservative source, on Blumenthal's account of Kosovo:

Even after the staff has been shaken up and Clinton is supposedly master in his own house, speechwriters stick a line promising not to use ground troops in Kosovo in his speech to the nation and Sandy Berger, his national security adviser, fails to take it out. Clinton, we are told, is furious because his options have been limited (though it then takes him more than two months to allow other options to be prepared). Berger is "snookered" by the Pentagon when it forces the NATO commander who had been too blunt in his demand for ground troops, General Wesley Clark, into retirement. "I'd like to kill somebody," Clinton tells Blumenthal.

Um, shouldn't the President of the United States read his own policy speeches before he gives them? Or was he too busy on other parts of the speech to care about the national defense parts? You know, the boring stuff? (And remember, this is an account by one of Clinton's friends).

And this:

You never know where the buck will stop. Clinton, it seems, is a prisoner of his own administration, in addition to having to face a baying press and savage opposition. Nowhere is this more the case than in the President's "intense battle with terrorism, a mostly secret war that was largely screened from the public." FBI director Louis Freeh, a Clinton appointee, becomes "a prime mover of scandal promotion against the Clinton administration," to the point that "Freeh's hostility to the White House dictated his lack of cooperation with the war against bin Laden." Clinton wants to do more than fire a few cruise missiles at the al-Qaeda leader; he wants to drop special ops troops into the mountains of Afghanistan in a surprise attack. Powell's successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Henry Shelton, recoils from his commander in chief's idea, saying such an attack would be too risky.

Clinton could always have fired Freeh, if he really believed this and thought the war on terrorism was as important as the battle for high approval ratings. Obviously, he didn't.

And who says a president can't overrule his military commanders? Nobody told George W. Bush that.

(Link via The American Scene)

SO, IT TURNS OUT that Major League Baseball has been berry berry good to members of Congress (about 60/40 to the Democrats), notably Dick Gephardt and James Sensenbrenner (the latter is chairman of a committee that oversees baseball's antitrust exemption), although frankly the amounts of money involved (at least for the individual members) isn't that much (you can't buy a guy like Gephardt for $5,000).

Some commentators have argued that there's something wrong or pernicious in raising questions about whether affirmative action had anything to do with the New York Times' willingness to keep promoting Jayson Blair in the face of mounting evidence that he was incompetent and/or dishonest. There are, to my mind, two obvious reasons why this is a story:

1. It is awfully hard to explain, rationally, why he got away with this, given the huge number of people who expressed doubts or even called for him to be fired. When rational motives fail, try invidious ones. If the shoe fits . . .

2. Had this happened at a less self-righteously PC publication than the Times - say, The New Republic, for example, let alone a conservative paper like the Wall Street Journal - the race point might have been ignored by most commentators. Scam artist being black: not a story. Scam artist being black and working for a paper that loves to talk about its own 'diversity' and editorialize in favor of affirmative action: story. I guarantee that's why people like Kaus and Howard Kurtz are quick to read it this way. In that sense, conservatives have jumped on the Times for this for precisely the same reason liberal commentators jumped on Bill Bennett (albeit with the difference that a massive fraud on the public is a wee bit bigger deal than a guy spending his own money on slot machines): because the Times has been such a scold on issues of race and trumpeted its own willingness to promote "diversity," there's a natural impulse to put them on the spot when a beneficiary of such programs blows up in the paper's face.

And in one very important respect, that instinct has been dead-on: although its now-famous probe of itself referred, among other things, to the fact that "[t]he Times offered him a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify its newsroom," the Times has steadfastly resisted the idea that any preference was given to Blair that would not have been given had he been white.

You must see the problem for the Times: the paper has repeatedly editorialized that it's perfectly OK to use even the stark racial preferences exposed in the Michigan affirmative action cases - but when pressed, the Times is unwilling to admit that it would give preference to an inferior journalist on the basis of race! In other words, when the paper's own credibility is on the line, it won't stand up for racial preferences, even when the alternative explanation is that the Times just doesn't give a damn about the quality of its newspaper.

Can there be a better illustration of why racial preferences are immoral? When even their most determined champions won't admit to them in the harsh light of day? Bill Bennett, at least, never preached in favor of gambling. The Times wants to discriminate on the basis of race - but only in secret, wink-wink, nudge-nudge. That, in the end, is a much bigger story than one reporter.

Part of the goal of kicking off the Conservative Truths series was as a way to distinguish the sane and reasonable types of people on the left from the bitter-enders who refuse to concede an inch to reality. There are Liberal Truths as well, and perhaps I'll post some if I can't get someone to bite on running an opposing series that has some sense to it.

The first response I got was revealing of the kind of attitude that conservatives often make fun of, usually to the response from liberal commentators that "nobody really thinks that." But here it is in print, and I swear I'm quoting this guy directly:

Liberal Truth #1: Tax cuts are government spending just like the military and welfare are government spending. It takes government revenue and spends in on a certain program. In this case, the money is spent every year on certain income earners in order to (supposedly) get them to reinvest the money in businesses and production. Tax cuts allot a certain portion of government revenue to supplanting taxed income, leaving the government with less money than it had before - in other words, the government's money is spent on tax cuts.

Wow. Cutting taxes lets you keep "government revenue." Your income, or the return on your investments, is "the government's money." Only out of the goodness of the government's heart does it let you keep any of it at all.

Sanity check: who is it that works for the money? And, come to think of it, whose government is it anyway? If I quit my job, can the government come after me next year and say I still owe the same amount of taxes? This ain't child-support we're talking about; I don't owe the government any obligation, and there's no Platonic ideal of 37% or 50% or 75% marginal tax rates that's being defiled by rate cuts. It's my money, and while society has a right to ask me to chip a portion of it in to pay for various necessities, that doesn't mean that the government has a claim on howsoever much it wants.

Now, when you move away from tax rates to some of the more complicated deductions ("do this and you can keep X that we otherwise would have taxed"), I'm more sympathetic to the argument that you've really got a spending program in disguise as a tax cut. But the basic idea that cutting taxes gives away "the government's money" -- well, that's a sign of a complete loss of perspective on which of us exists for the other's benefit. It's our money, and it's our government.

Well, looks like the kickoff of my "Conservative Truths" series really knocked over the beehive, attracting a bunch of comments here and over at CalPundit's site, and we had by far our biggest traffic day ever on Monday (391 unique visitors), which had to be the result of the link from Kevin Drum (although we'd set records on Thursday and again on Friday, in part due to a link from Steven Den Beste).

The buzz is a good thing; the long-term goal here is to build a framework for making sense of political arguments. (Some people weren't happy with the level of generality in my observation about incentives, but the idea here is mostly to work on a general level and refer specific posts back to the theory).

If I made one mistake, it was picking the dividend tax cut, which is intensely controversial and on some level unpredictable in its effects, as the prime example; a more obvious example is simply the Congressional Budget Office scoring system, under which you traditionally assume that there will be no changes in behavior resulting from a tax cut and no economic growth flowing therefrom; the Democrats must be quite aware that these projections are bogus, and yet they and their friends in the media have tended to treat these numbers as gospel truth. And, of course, the entire Great Society welfare system was constructed essentially without regard for how the system would change incentives to work and to keep families together; the failure to account for the incentive effect of such programs was the Achilles heel of the entire initiative.

Another famous example was the luxury tax imposed during the Bush I years; the Democrats argued that they could soak the rich buyers of yachts, but instead, yacht consumption dropped by 70%, with devastating effects on the yacht-building industry, and had to be swiftly repealed. (Granted, The American Prospect argued that the tax still brought in several times more revenue than projected, but that didn't do the guys at the dock much good). The refusal of Democratic policy-makers to consider incentive effects in the way they develop and promote their initiatives remains one of the critical dividing lines between the two major parties.

Couple of quick comments to this article about a speech given by Ted Sorensen (registration required):

1. Most importantly, why is it newsworthy? Does the Times provide equal coverage to speeches in favor of the war that are given by former Eisenhower speechwriters?

2. He conveniently forgets Vietnam. I suppose that was LBJ's fault, or better yet, Nixon's?

3. He states, "He added, "It will be the law of the jungle in which every warlord has his own weapons of mass destruction, and the first or biggest bomb wins." But, wasn't part of the reason we went to war with Iraq to avoid this?

You know, sometimes I think I could make a living on this site just keeping an eye on the doings at my alma maters, Holy Cross and Harvard. This controversy, in which students at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard are protesting the selection of Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as commencement speaker, is just rich with idiocy:

[A]bout 100 of the school's 500 graduating students, and another 20 who are not graduating in June, signed a petition criticizing the choice because, they say, the governor is more businessman than public servant, lacks international stature, and has displayed a ''profound lack of courage'' in office.

So Romney "lacks international stature." Since when is running the freaking Olympics not "international"? Maybe they should've invited the US ambassador to Canada (Paul Cellucci)? That's an international job.

The students' letter to the dean recommended several other speakers, Republicans among them, who they said ''exemplify personal sacrifice and service to the public,'' including Christine Todd Whitman, Environmental Protection Agency administrator and former New Jersey governor; Senator John McCain, Homeland Security director Tom Ridge, and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani.

The sense of entitlement here is staggering. I mean, I know the K-School is a big deal, but isn't it possible that some of these people were, you know, busy? My college graduation, we had an obscure bureaucrat from the National Institute of Health. My Harvard Law School graduation, the university speaker was a different obscure bureaucrat from the National Institute of Health. At the Law School's separate graduation ceremony we had Ted Turner, who was drunk, off his meds or both (he started rambling about how "we should never have split the atom. Those are dangerous little buggers.") The Governor's coming to speak at your school. That's not bad.

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First in a series.

As you may have noticed, one of my running themes here of late has been the difficulty of finding intellectually honest people on the other side of political arguments. This is particularly infuriating because I know plenty of decent, honest people who are politically liberal. Yet, the combination of professional Democrats and leftist bloggers too often leaves me feeling like I'm dealing with people who are immune to both reason and reality.

Liberals and conservatives, or Democrats and Republicans, or Left and Right - however you define the two sides - disagree on a lot of basic assumptions about how the world works. Some of those gaps can't be bridged by even the most fair-minded commentators. But on others, one of the things that drives me berserk is when the other side just refuses to admit to something that is frankly impossible for a reasonable person to argue with.

So, in an effort to focus on the things I see as litmus tests for honest commentary, I'll be starting a periodic series on The Conservative Truths and The Conservative Beliefs. Both are things that many or most conservatives believe; the former are those that we feel any intellectually honest liberal or leftist should have to admit. (I would, of course, welcome a similar initiative by someone on the other side). I'm not putting them in any particular numerical order.

Today, we start with Conservative Truth #1: Incentives matter. Government initiatives that give rewards or punishment as a result of individual or corporate behavior will change people's incentives and therefore, applied to a large population, will change behavior. The result is that any estimate of the effects of a government program will be erroneous if it fails to take account of the incentive effect.

This seems astoundingly obvious, and yet discussions by politicians and the media of the effects of things like tax cuts, welfare plans and health care plans have far too often completely ignored the incentive issue. About the only time you hear the Democrats admit that taxing something will change it is when they tax smoking - the one good whose sales won't be much affected by taxes because the buyers are addicted. Congress has for many years institutionalized this resistance to reality by "scoring" the revenue effects of tax cuts or tax hikes on the assumption that nobody ever changes their behavior in response. And critics of tax-cutting Republicans invariably cite these transparently fraudulent estimates as Exhibit A on the "cost" of tax cuts. How can an honest person take such criticisms seriously?

Now, for Conservative Belief #1, and I'll classify this as a Belief because I recognize that it's more controversial: that the incentive effects following from most government initiatives are, in general, larger and more powerful than the dollar size of government intakes or outflows on the initiative. Here's an example:

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Matthew Yglesias asks why more conservative bloggers haven't rushed to defend Bush's tax cut plan. Leaving aside the obvious fact that he mostly cites self-identified libertarians, there's an obvious reason why many bloggers focus on war and legal and social issues rather than economics, which is that arguing about taxes and spending is awfully number-intensive. In the specific case of spending, it's easy enough to look at the aggregate numbers and see that the government is spending too much on the domestic side, and similarly to highlight press reports about the worst abuses. But wading through the budget to figure out exactly where the most money is wasted is exceptionally time-consuming work. Which is why most of us, even when we support tax cuts, are apt to focus our fire more on other issues.

I know I'd finished up with the Bill Bennett controversy, but this quote struck me as interesting on a number of levels, so I'll just present it without further comment - here's Bennett, speaking to Ronald Reagan just before a speech Reagan was to give on the Iran-Contra affair:

"Word is you're going to take responsibility and acknowledge mistakes, and that's fine. But, sir, don't underestimate what your enemies want from you. They want you to humiliate yourself; they want the hair shirt. But you can't do that, sir. You're the leader of the free world. You're the leader of a great and proud country, and you can't abase yourself . . . if you don't give them what they want they'll say you didn't go far enough. That'll be the line."

(From Peggy Noonan's indispensable book What I Saw At The Revolution)

Jonathan Chait complains that Bush-hatred "has made liberals embrace principles . . . to which the Clinton administration never adhered."

Is there any other kind of principle?

Back before I decided that it was mostly a waste of my time to read the most popular far-left blogs, I used to be bothered by the incessant accusation that George W. Bush had been AWOL from his service in the Texas National Guard and had thus essentially gotten away with avoiding his commitment to serve. This bothered me for two reasons:

1. I considered the charge a serious one, if true. Military commitments must be kept. Maybe it doesn't evince the sort of anti-military cast of mind as Clinton's adventures in draft avoidance and protest on foreign soil, but it doesn't speak well of a commitment to keep the most important sorts of promises to soldiers.

2. Nobody who I viewed as having any credibility ever addressed the accusations (positively or negatively), which makes it hard to get a fix on whether it has any substance (although that's usually a clue).

The issue came to life again recently following Bush's much-ballyhooed jet flight to the USS Abraham Lincoln; Bush made references to having been a pilot, and The Krug (who's often indistinguishable from the anonymous far-left bloggers in terms of venom and disregard for the facts), sprang into action with a column repeating the charge.

Now, spurred on by an item on Andrew Sullivan, Bill Hobbs has looked into the question in some detail, reviewing the major media reports as well as some of the purported primary sources, and come up with a pair of posts here and here that fairly well lay to rest the idea that there's anything to the charges but, at best, wild speculation and conjecture premised on a lack of good recordkeeping on the part of the Texas National Guard. You've probably read Hobbs' posts already - they've been linked to all over the blogosphere - but if you haven't, I'd suggest you do. Some things I hadn't known:

1. Gore was discharged early, leaving his and Bush's service time basically the same. Wonder why he didn't press this issue? He made vague references to Bush's service record, but never openly made the charge.

2. When Bush volunteered for the TX Guard, they were actually being sent to combat in Vietnam. He joined what looked, at the time, like potentially a combat unit. (It was still a better deal than getting drafted into the infantry, to be sure).

There are two other sources that are worth reading on this point, and I'll quote from them at length here because they didn't appear on the front pages of these sites and you might have missed them:

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Archpundit on Political State Report carries word that former GOP governor Jim Edgar has the early lead in hypothetical matchups to replace retiring GOP Senator Peter Fitzgerald.

The Sunday Washington Post Magazine had an extensive article here on presidential candidate Sen. Bob Graham. (I didn't know that his half-brother was Phil Graham, of Washington Post and Katherine Graham fame.) Scary to think about it, but I do believe Graham has a point -- while Bush has been successful, to date, in bringing the war to the terrorists, I have a nagging feeling that we still are too vulnerable to another attack. That being said, I'm not sure I buy the conventional wisdom that another terrorist attack would make Bush politically vulnerable. Rather, I suspect it may actually drive up his ratings for three reasons: (1) Bush has shown he can handle such events with true leadership, (2) I suspect the public recognizes that Bush is doing a lot to protect us and another attack would underscore why we need him in office and (3) natural, patriotic instinct.

My initial gut reaction to the Bill Bennett controversy was, among other things, that this was a complete waste of time. Maybe I overreacted a little, if only because I'd read Josh Marshall's teaser ahead of time and expected a much bigger story than legal gambling that Bennett could afford.

I'd have to agree that the scope of Bennett's gambling does, at least, raise questions about his fitness for public office. But, of course, Bennett hasn't held public office in more than a decade (I don't know, he may have been on some advisory commission or something, but it's not the same thing), and nobody's suggested that he was gambling millions of dollars when he did. That's one of the innumerable distinctions from the Clinton situations (take your pick which one). The level of public scrutiny that's appropriate depends very much on how much power we give the person, which is why presidents (and, to a lesser extent, Supreme Court justices) are really in another league even from legislators, let alone pundits like Bennett.

I'm also not so quick as Andrew Sullivan to characterize casino gambling as something done in "privacy" - Bennett's "privacy" has perhaps been invaded to some degree, but it's not one of the more serious violations I can think of.

And some good has come of this: much unlike our 42nd president, Bennett is subject to the very social pressures of shame and disapproval that he has championed, and he is (apparently) willing to take personal responsibility, pay his debts (by all accounts, he has always done so) and stop going to casinos.

In the end, perhaps Jonathan Last was right: it may be a legit story, but one that would have been better served as a side item and not trumpeted as a big deal. And those critics who hope to strangle Bennett with the story and silence his voice for a moral society should still be ashamed of themselves.

Teresa Heinz -- excuse me, Teresa Heinz Kerry -- has a reputation for being outspoken. The impact this will have on the presidential campaign trail has been the topic of much speculation for some time now in the Boston media, but I'm not sure how much attention the national media has paid to this issue. Read a bit about it here.

I may go back to the Bill Bennett flap at some point, although it would be hard indeed to top Jonah Goldberg's devastating take; for now, Ross Douthat has some valuable points about why conservative Catholics shouldn't let Bennett off so easily.

The departure of White House Budget Director Mitch Daniels (leaving to run for Governor of Indiana) is sad, but inevitable; a budget director who lasted 4 whole years without making enough enemies to make his job impossible, probably wouldn't be doing the job in the first place. Slate marks the occasion with an excellent column noting one of the Bush Administration's few (so far) successful anti-pork initiatives: taking on the Army Corps of Engineers, which despite its name has a huge bureaucracy and bloated budget that have nothing to do with war.

Erin O'Connor has some interesting statistics about the gender gap in college:

According to the U.S. Department of Education, 698,000 women received bachelor’s degrees in 2002, while 529,000 men did. Some other chilling numbers: women outnumber men by a four to three ratio on American campuses (that means there are almost two million more women in college than men). Only 43% of all college degrees go to men. Things are worse within minority populations: two black women earn bachelor’s degrees for every black man; 60 percent of Hispanic college graduates are women.

What's particularly amusing is the reaction of some gender feminists to these figures:

Jacqueline Woods, executive director of the American Association of University Women, denies that men's declining enrollments is a crisis or even a gender issue. She notes that those concerned about boys' sagging educational performance are "playing a zero-sum game" and says "I refuse to play."

Remember that line next time one of these ideologues complains about men supposedly getting better pay than women.

From Margaret Carlson, of all people:

"[H]as anyone ever gotten more out of sexual favors she didn't dispense than Sen. [Hillary] Clinton?"

I think she meant sexual favors someone else dispensed, but the double meaning sounds just fine.

Seems the New York Times had to fire a reporter who exceeded even the Times' tolerance for sloppy journalism, albeit due to plagiarism rather than egregious factual misstatements. Howard Kurtz's writeup notes a jaw-dropping figure: "the paper has run 50 corrections on his stories" since 1999. But then, that's probably nothing compared to some of the paper's front-page veterans.

I never thought much of Bill Clinton's cry of "politics of personal destruction" whenever he got caught abusing the powers of his office. But personal attacks really can get out of hand sometimes. Josh Marshall ran a teaser that turned out to be a little smoke but not much fire: Bill Bennett likes to gamble. And he's probably lost a lot of money doing it. But there's no claim that he's got any of the serious problems we associate with gamblers, like tax trouble, debts he can't pay, etc. More like a Michael Jordan-type gambling issue: he loses money other people couldn't afford to lose.

This seems like a pathetically weak case for calling 'hypocrite' to me, which makes this really nothing but the exposure of a man's private life for no useful purpose. At worst, it suggests that Bennett has pulled punches on this particular vice because he doesn't see it as that bad, perhaps in part because he enjoys it.

But what's really sickening about investing major investigative resources and running this kind of story is the idea that you can discredit the entire notion of morality by showing that individuals who speak out for moral standards are, in fact, sinners themselves. Bennett never said he was perfect; if only perfect people could speak up for right over wrong, wrong would have the floor to itself. There are people who wish that were so. But I would have hoped that a seemingly reasonable guy like Marshall wouldn't be one of them.

UPDATE: Marshall defends his position, complete with putting the word "morality" in scare quotes.

An amusing story that appears to be true. Amazing that an 18-year old feels sufficiently emboldened to weigh in on senior level staff decisions of the US Air Force.

I'm not sure I have a lot to add to this one right now, but I can't very well let pass this story about the controversy at my alma mater, Holy Cross, involving the decision to give an honorary degree to pro-choice alum Chris Matthews. The main lesson here: the president, Father MacFarlane, has not covered himself in glory with his ham-fisted treatment of dedicated alumni and his repeated decisions to side with the PC crowd (including an incident, not mentioned here, where he was slow to come to the defense of a secretary who was forced, shortly after September 11, to take down a flag near her desk by a professor who objected to the flag).

On the subject of stuff I've seen on Calpundit's site, he linked to an analysis arguing that John Kerry's latest broadside against Howard Dean (more on this in the next post) was tactically brilliant because it helps boost Dean's visibility and create the perception that Kerry v. Dean is the real race. I don't disagree with that, but . . . well, I've previously noted here and here that Kerry's temperament and his staff choices suggested that he would be The Mean Candidate in the primaries, and in recent Democratic history, it's always The Mean Candidate who wins, always the guy with the most ruthless will to power. As a Democrat, cheer if you will at the idea that Kerry is an ace at tactics -- but hasn't the Democrats' problem in the last two elections been largely that they put too much faith in tactics and not enough in ideas and honest debate about the issues? Look at the way Kerry aide (and former Gore and Gray Davis aide) Chris Lehane tries to bully Howard Dean into taking a position completely off the table, and tell me that anything at all has been learned from 2000 and 2002.

Calpundit touched off a liively debate in the comments section (complete with a thorough debunking by Jane Galt) with his call for more taxation on "millionaires." One thing that got to me about this: "millionaires" is a deceptive term when you talk about taxation; we don't generally tax wealth (with the exception of the estate tax), we tax income or capital gains. And a person with a high income in one year or a large amount of capital gains in one year is not always going to be "rich" over the course of their lifetime. The obvious example of this is a senior citizen who liquidates her investments in a one-shot deal, maybe to pay for a big medical bill, or a grandchild's college, or heck, even to get her son a good criminal defense lawyer. Is she "rich"? Or what about an illiterate guy who makes $500K a year for his three-year NFL career, and retires at age 26 with bad knees and no useful skills?

I've previously noted Noam Schrieber's theory that the Democrats are too beholden to a small coterie of inside-the-Beltway pollsters and political consultants, who have an undue influence on the party's ideas, rhetoric and tactics. Howard Fineman's latest 2004 presidential race rundown supports this thesis:

INSIDERS EVERYWHERE

Winning campaigns usually, though not always, are led by candidates and managers who haven't been around Washington and the upper echelons of electioneering. Recent examples include the Reaganites, who came out of California circles, and the Clinton campaign, which was led by a cadre of younger hands who hadn't managed a presidential campaign before.
That's not true this time. Each of the Big Five campaigns is being run by a member of the Washington Democratic management elite. That includes the "outsider" Dean, whose main man is Joe Trippi, a savvy veteran who began his career working on Walter Mondale's campaign in 1984. At least Trippi has moved to Vermont, where Dean was governor for a decade. The rest of the Trippi family is about to follow him north. "I love it up here," he says. He sounded like he meant it. But the rest of his consulting firm is still in Washington.

So much for the Democrats' faith in the tolerance of their own primary voters:

A senior advisor to another campaign scoffs at the idea that Lieberman will appeal to the largely rural voters who go to the polls then: "Lieberman's got endorsements in Oklahoma, but, when it comes to Oklahoma voters--." There is a long pause. "Enough said."

(From The New Republic; registration required).

OK, one more post on Santorum to wrap up. To recap, there are three things that are controversial about the substance of Santorum's remarks:

1. His legal argument that the Constitution does not provide a "right of privacy" that prevents the government from regulating sex between consenting adults in a private place.

2. His political argument that sodomy laws are good public policy.

3. His moral argument that homosexual acts are immoral.

There are two additional controversies about his remarks:

4. Questions about whether Santorum acted offensively even by raising the subject.

5. Questions about whether Santorum expressed his opinions in a way that was offensive.

I've covered a few of these already (I'm with Santorum on the legal argument but against him on the political argument); I'd like to focus mainly on the moral argument.

Read More »

I'm about ready to wrap up the Santorum issue shortly; one or two more posts to go. I was wondering when Josh Marshall would finally weigh in - seeing as he was the leader of the pack on the Lott fiasco -- and here he is:

Now you have the President supporting Santorum and calling him an "inclusive man." For the reasons Eleanor Clift sets forth here, I guess the president doesn't feel it's possible to criticize Santorum -- which tells you a lot. But "inclusive"? I can think of a number of words he could have used. 'Principled'? Maybe they're bad principles, but he's principled. 'Deeply religious'? Okay. But 'inclusive'?

One thing that hurts politicians more than anything is saying things that make them sound ridiculous. Calling Rick Santorum 'inclusive' makes the president sound ridiculous.

I have to agree. Bush had trouble avoiding being ridiculous during the 2000 primaries, but he's been much improved since then. I think his response here was along the lines of when he said Putin had a good heart.

In the vein of smartertimes.com, this blog does a great job pointing out the biases and idiocies of the Boston Globe. For those in the Boston area, check it out -- its worth a look.

I largely agree with Jonah Goldberg on the outcome on sodomy laws: they should be repealed, but they aren't unconstitutional. One quibble; Goldberg says:

Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign -a leading gay rights organization, led a chorus of liberal critics saying in response: "When Trent Lott made similar comments, he lost his position as majority leader, and it is time for the Republican Party to consider similar steps with Senator Santorum."

First, let's cover a little history. The Civil War was America's bloodiest conflict. It cost nearly 1,100,000 casualties, claimed 620,000 lives in perhaps more than 10,000 armed clashes. The war divided the nation for generations after it ended.

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s didn't claim nearly as many lives, but it, too, transformed American life, rearranging institutions, public and private, and rewriting the language of the nation. And, you know what? None of it had anything to do with gay people.

Brother didn't fight brother over gay marriage or homosexuals in the military. Men didn't brave police dogs and fire hoses to overturn sodomy laws and the National Guard was never called in to restore order after gays were allowed through the schoolhouse door. Gays weren't kidnapped in Africa and brought to America against their will to toil in our fields.

It's important to keep all this in mind as the chorus of comparisons between Santorum and Lott gets louder, demanding that Santorum step down from his leadership position as Lott was forced to do.

When Trent Lott defended Jim Crow, he was defending something that had been rejected by two generations of Americans. Countless elections, debates, movies, books, marches and court decisions stand as testimony to the fact that America is resolved to put Jim Crow behind us. Lott dug up a skeleton that everyone wanted to remain buried, and he was punished for it.

Santorum, meanwhile, was giving an opinion about an existing law that is currently being debated in the Supreme Court. In short, homosexuality and race are just different things. They describe different things. They have different roles in our history and culture.

I know what Goldberg's driving at here, but the fact that Jim Crow is dead could just as easily cut the other way: because Santorum is advocating a position that still has support, if you find his views offensive or dangerous, then they are worse because they can still command respect.

More to follow.

I'll probably have a few more posts on the Rick Santorum controversy; I don't relish the topic, but as with my coverage of the Trent Lott imbroglio in December, we conservative webloggers have an obligation to wrestle with the tough questions of what is, and isn't, a reasonable application of conservative principles.

This is not the debate Bush wants to have right now, as we try to segue into domestic policy and ramp up the fight on judicial nominees. But it's his own damn fault; he could've pardoned those guys in Texas either as Governor or President, on a "the government has more important things to do" platform, which would effectively have struck a death blow to sodomy laws without the need to offend religious conservatives by making a statement that would be read as saying "this is OK."

Then again, the key primary for the Dems in 2004 is South Carolina, so other than Howard Dean, none of their presidential candidates is likely to relish a fight about sodomy just right now (especially since unlike Trent Lott, Santorum's not going anywhere and may yet be Senate Majority Leader when Frist retires in 2006).

This poll would seem to support my general theory that success in the war on terror will give George W. Bush a fighting chance of winning New York in 2004.

WELL, there's certainly been plenty of commentary on Rick Santorum's controversial comments on the Texas sodomy case presently before the Supreme Court. Predictably, critics like the New York Times disapproved, without bothering to explain why Santorum was wrong. Let's go through this in some detail.

What did he actually say?

The San Francisco Chronicle helpfully reprints the whole interview, and before you jump to criticize Santorum -- or to defend him -- I'd suggest you read it all.

Read More »

Robert "Man Without Qualities" Musil has two interesting posts: first, he catches a typical example of Atrios quoting someone far, far out of context to make a point; then he notes that Bill Clinton seems to be serving the same role that Hillary did when Bill was the candidate: feeding red meat (or, in this case, beige tofu) to partisans on the Left, while letting his wife keep her distance from the more obviously irresponsible statements.

Before you can have the courage of your convictions, you need the intellectual clarity to recognize them. I wasn't initially too sure what I thought about Tom Daschle being warned by his local bishop not to keep identifying himself as a Catholic, but Jane Galt (who's not even Catholic, but is instead from Manhattan) puts Catholics like me to shame with a stirring defense of the Church's ability to do this.

"We prize as the greatest of freedoms the freedom to choose. But we are not really free to choose until we become sufficiently disciplined to know what the results of our choices will be."

--Ronald Reagan, in 1971.

Also from the Corner, this amusing story about a panel featuring notorious academic postmodernist theorists who seemed unwilling to even try to defend the relevance of their own theories to the real world.

I just knew this was coming: somebody from NOW objects to a murder charge for Laci Peterson's child, fearing that giving any legal protection to a child carried nearly to term would help the pro-life cause: "If this is murder, well, then any time a late-term fetus is aborted, they could call it murder" Jonah Goldberg is right that this is just one county-level NOW rep, but it's still all too characteristic of the mindset that places the value of abortion above even the prohibition on murder.

The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have the details on John Edwards' impressive fundraising, more than half of which comes from lawyers, mostly the plaintiffs' bar (and including some fishy items like legal secretaries donating the maximum $2,000 at the same time as their bosses). This is what I've always thought would be Edwards' Achilles heel: not that he himself is untrustworthy because he's a plaintiffs' lawyer - he paints himself in a fairly sympathetic light - but that his background as a plaintiffs' lawyer, combined with financial dependence on the plaintiffs' bar, would make him blind to its faults, resistant to even the most reasonable reforms, and ultimately easy to caricature (fairly) as a tool of a single interest group, and one that most Americans have at least some distrust of.

Reading this blog entry is a good shorthand for why Gary Hart - even if he had stayed active in the public eye the last 15 years, which he hasn't - would be such a lousy presidential candidate: he spends too much time talking about how complicated and intricate everything is, and too little time explaining anything clearly. He's like Dukakis or the pre-1999 Gore this way. It's a combination of pedantry and self-satisfaction that's just toxic in presidential politics. Ask any litigator: your job in explaining things to people who haven't heard them explained before is to make everything as simple as possible - not dumbing it down, just stripping issues to their essence.

Unsuccessful candidates tell you they have a vision. Successful ones make you see it.

And do we really want a Leader of the Free World who has Hesiod on his blogroll?

This has to be good news: a sharp drop in pollution in the U.S. between 1995 and 2000, even without drastic remedies like the Kyoto treaty. Give some credit where it's due: this occurred on Bill Clinton's watch, and under the auspices of the Clean Air Act forced on George H.W. Bush by Congressional Democrats. On the other hand, it happened without anything more radical, much to the undoubted chagrin of the Gores and Naders of the world.

It's way early yet, but Republicans have to be encouraged by polls showing Tom Daschle trailing his likely potential opponent (John Thune) in a 2004 Senate race.

Gray Davis gets "the lowest rating for a Governor in Field Poll history" and a plurality now supports removing him from office.

Yep, that's the Democrats' most prominent governor. No wonder the presidential candidates are mostly from inside the Beltway.

With the Senate hanging in the balance, the sudden retirement of the GOP's most vulnerable incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois, does not bode well, although it's early enough to get someone else in the race. We'll wait and see if there's more to this story.

I guess the whole Masters protest story turned out to be a big dud:

What appeared to happen here was more evidence that dissent on the left is a dying lifestyle. It is firmly the era of Nobody Wants to Hear It. While tens of thousands more antiwar activists were not turning out to protest the Iraq war (or to call for an end to all war-occupation-aggression-racism-injustice) on the same day in Washington, hundreds were not disembarking from buses to join the attack against Augusta National's old-boys club.

Protest organizers grumbled that too much media showed up, and they were miffed that 100 police cars were parked nearby -- enough extra fuzz to film a Burt Reynolds car chase extravaganza. Eleanor Smeal, of the Feminist Majority Foundation, took to the microphone and let out an emotional war whoop straight out of some other era, circa 1974; Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) fumbled through her speech in a nasal Manhattan accent, and people laughed, as if a Yankee caricature had been special-ordered to entertain the crowd.

Some sorority sisters from Georgia Tech, who drove over to see "the crazies, the weirdos," hopped out of their car, hugged each other and made perfect smiles for a group picture atop a knoll with the anti-Augusta circus playing out behind them. Around the same time, a man with dark, short hair and a self-satisfied grin started waving a bright orange sign while Burk spoke. The sign said "Make Me Dinner" on one side and "Iron My Shirt" on the other. A desperate media pounced on him -- not to stop him but to get any kind of sound bite from him.

He gave his first name as Haywood and a last name that would have made it obscene, an old trick you think nobody would fall for anymore, and yet, many
reporters carefully wrote H-a-y-w-o-o-d in their notes and then asked him to
spell his last name.

While I tend to be suspicious of academics who try to penalize speech they don't like, this story of a campus newspaper being shut down over an offensive April Fool's issue seems like an example of free speech rights being legitimately outweighed by decency and common sense. The reasons why are exactly the same reasons why Columbia, for example, would be acting not only legally but appropriately if it fired that professor who called for "a million Mogadishus." With rights come responsibilities, and particularly in the example of a privilege like operating a campus newspaper funded by the college, there is such a thing as going beyond the pale.

This chart on the latest corporate-welfare bailout of the airlines is just appalling.

I do try to read left- or liberal-leaning blogs, both to fairly hear the other side and to find bad ideas to stamp out; sometimes I'll even try to engage people in the comment sections. But two blogs that I've about had it with are Atrios and mini-Atrios (aka Hesiod). There are many reasons for this; Hesiod in particular has become totally unhinged by the war, lurching off into 'black helicopter' territory and mumbling about a 'Bush Fedayeen' that's out to murder critics of the president. But another reason is their hatred and contempt for Christianity. Check out this post from Hesiod, which is an extreme example. And there's this, from Atrios, who basically quotes a preacher preaching and thinks it's a punchline.

Gotta find me the loyal opposition. These clowns ain't where it's at.

Isn't it a little silly for John Kerry to make an issue of Bush's pre-presidential foreign policy experience? The guy's presided over unprecdented crises, two wars, made multiple speeches to the UN, met with innumerable foreign leaders. Whatever you think his relevant experience was, that's not an issue. But in the Democratic primaries, you have to remember that 2000 (and September 2001) never happened.

Election law blogger Rick Hasen has the transcript of an NPR report discussing unusual behind-the-scenes details of the divisions on the three-judge court considering the constitutionality of McCain-Feingold. Hasen also follows up on a comment by Volokh Conspiracy blogger (and my law school colleague) Orin Kerr on the same subject. (Links via Howard Bashman)

Donald Luskin has a pair of interesting posts on the California energy crisis of 2001, the recent FERC report on same, and Paul Krugman's misreading of both.

Larry Kudlow thinks there's no reason for tax-cutters to panic over the Senate's vote slashing the "size" of the President's tax cut package to $350 billion from $725 billion. This is all inside baseball type stuff, as he points out; there's still plenty of time for the conference report to decide the ultimate fate of the tax cuts. A few thoughts:

+This should qualify for Kaus' competition for sneaking a story out in the fog of war - the Dems get to vote for higher taxes while nobody's looking.

+The vote was on the overall size of the package as measured by static revenue estimates -- but that tells us very little about what the final package will look like. To my mind, the most important parts are that the package should accelerate whatever cuts are going through, and should cut dividend taxes to give the stock market a shot in the arm.

+The "static" revenue estimates are, of course, fraudulent, and everyone knows it, not least because they assume that nobody changes behavior in response to tax cuts (which is idiotic) but also because they rest on predictions of the unpredictable several years down the line. Unfortunately, that's the only way Washington measures these things (what ever happened to the idea that a GOP Congress would change the scoring system? That's far more important and far-reaching than most of the other things Congress does).

+This is partly a response to the House increasing the size of Bush's proposal, which is also a negotiating position.

+It'd obviously be very good to totally eliminate the dividend tax, since a tax that's repealed is much harder to restore than it is to raise a tax that's been cut. But Bush was originally expected to propose just cutting it in half. Which gets to the strategic issue: yet again, Bush has shifted the terms of debate to whether he gets the whole tax cut package or just another big tax cut. Once again, the Democrats are reduced to wasting their fire on the boldest initiatives, and have to concede most of the ground Bush really wants.

But, of course, we know Bush isn't that smart, right?

Two African-American cops are murdered on Staten Island, and Al Sharpton and friends, the supposed 'champions' of the community these cops came from, are silent. Tireless NYPD advocate Heather MacDonald has the story. (Link via Kaus).

Turns out that John Kerry embraced his Jewish heritage for the jokes.

On the flight, I caught up on a fascinating draft law review article by Peter Berkowitz and Benjamin Wittes, defending the Bush v. Gore decision against an attack by Laurence Tribe (the article is a working paper and hasn't been cleaned up for legal citation, but I assume it's fair grounds for comment since they put it on the web; link courtesy of Stanley Kurtz at NRO).

The thesis of the article is that both the majority and concurring opinions in Bush, despite the scorn heaped on them from liberal legal academics, were at least reasonable resolutions of the issues before the Court. The authors are careful to point out that the Court really could have gone either way on the Equal Protection ground and could likewise have declined to hear the case at all; they are more definitive in arguing that (1) Tribe is totally wrong and overwrought in claiming that the terms of the Twelfth Amendment (which gives the Senate the job of counting the electoral votes) barred the Court from considering the issue (they note that Tribe himself did not make this argument in representing Gore before the Supreme Court); (2) that the Florida Supreme Court's decisions were not only unreasonable but a clear departure from the statutory scheme and (3) that this departure gave strong support to the concurring justices' conclusion that the recount procedures that were ordered violated Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.

They make two particularly interesting arguments. First, they note that Tribe essentially concedes all the key points of federal law -- i.e., that a sufficiently arbitrary or extreme departure from state law or from equal treatment of voters could justify overturning a recount under both the Equal Protection Clause and Article II -- and thus that his quarrel with the Court is really about Florida law and the facts of the case. This, alone, shifts the ground of the dispute away from the idea that the Court bent or twisted constitutional law, and onto the ground where the Court's critics are on their weakest ground, which is in trying to defend the Florida Supreme Court and the Gore camp's absurdly biased legal strategy. They particularly note the utter lack of justification for the Florida Supremes in counting only a partial recount of Miami-Dade County that tilted to the county's most heavily Democratic precincts.

Second, they note that the Florida Supreme Court was completely unjustified in disregarding the clear statutory mandate of deference to Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris' reading of the election laws, which the Court's critics have apparently elided by looking solely at the recount provisions of the Florida election code and ignoring that the Secretary of State was given authority to interpret the entire election code. This is not the kind of mistake that experienced law professors should make, at least not if they're being intellectually honest.

The authors clearly sympathize more with the Article II argument, and the more I read about the issue, the more I agree with them.
Now, I haven't read Tribe's article, although the excerpts presented by Berkowitz and Wittes are lengthy. My own reaction at the time was that the real problem with the recount was the absence of a rational basis for the post hoc judicial remedy, and if the result of Bush v. Gore is more scrutiny of judicial remedies ordered after an election, when judges are most likely to be tempted to bend the rules, it's hard to argue with that. After all, recall that the Bush v. Gore decision ultimately restored the status quo; what was subjected to constitutional scrutiny was the remedy ordered by a state appellate court.

A few of the federal law questions are not addressed by the authors, such as Bush's standing to intervene and raise the Equal Protection challenge, which after all involved not his rights but the rights of the voters (on the other hand, if anyone had standing to raise the Article II issue it would have to be the candidate or possibly the electors). I'd also be interested to see a discussion of whether the political question doctrine would ever justify a federal court in vacating the state court remedy rather than deciding that a political question unsuitable for court decision must therefore be resolved by the state courts.

Speaking of John Kerry's burdens as frontrunner, TNR argues that he's the one Democrat who can take the short-term heat for denouncing Al Sharpton in the primaries. True enough, as far as it goes; but the problem with Sharpton is November 2004, when he could decide he's been 'disrespected' and pull the plug on Democratic efforts to get out African-American voters in New York and possibly other cities as well. That could hand New York State, at a minimum, to George Bush, and possibly undercut Chuck Schumer's re-election as well if he's facing a decent opponent (if I'm Schumer, I'm quietly doing everything possible now to secure the loyalty of the black churches outside of Sharpton). There are a number of states where even a small swing in the African-American turnout could give Bush the state -- Louisiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Missouri. Losing New York, of course, would be a death blow to any Democrat's hopes of winning the White House, and as I've argued before, the combination of a conservative upstate climate and the intense focus of NY City voters on the war on terror could easily put NY in legitimate play for Republicans on the presidential level for the first time since 1984.

I can't resist the temptation to pile on Jim Moran, the idiot Democrat congressman from Virginia and (I am embarrassed to add) alumnus of my own Holy Cross College, who had a Trent Lott/Cynthia McKinney moment last Monday:

"If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq we would not be doing this," Moran said, in comments first reported by the Reston Connection and confirmed by Moran. "The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going and I think they should."

Moran's a fool, and should be shown the door in 2004, like Earl Hilliard and McKinney before him; hopefully his largely white constituency will have the same good sense that Hilliard's and McKinney's African-American constitutents showed, and will dump him in the primaries. In the meantime, the Democratic party could use to have at least someone prominent denounce the guy (John Kerry, as a former Irishman, might take a whack).

Liberal blogger Atrios is outraged, rightly, at vicious anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler statements made by the Reverend Moon. This is nasty, nasty stuff, and totally inexcusable.

Atrios has another point in mind: discrediting the crusading conservative newspaper Moon owns, the Washington Times. Like a lot of bloggers on the left, he wants to analogize this to the crucial organizational role played in annti-war protests by ANSWER and other groups run by Communists.

I don't buy the analogies, for two reasons:

1. The anti-war movement pretends to be a popular mass movement; much of its efforts have been directed at getting publicity for the size of the crowds it draws, etc. Thus, it's exceptionally relevant to show that such a movement is being directed by Stalinists.

2. The anti-war movement has invested a huge amount of emotional capital in criticizing and demonizing the motives and financial backing of those who support war, usually as a way of avoiding the merits. Turnabout is always fair play.

Again, I'm not disagreeing with Atrios' condemnation of Moon, just his preferred use of the information.

Mindles Dreck with some thoughts on Alterman, Bernard Goldberg, and media bias; of particular significance is his observation that the leftist critiques of the media come from people who are quite far to the left, and who think of mainstream Democrats as being "conservative." It's also worth noting that the two sides focus on different issues: Goldberg is talking about social issues, while Alterman and his ilk seem obsessed with labor-management disputes.

Turns out that Margaret Thatcher drew some of her iron resolve from one of Chrchill's favorite sources: whiskey.

Barbara Boxer: "People have to wake up in this nation . . . We cannot take for granted the gifts we have. And right now, these gifts are going back to the store, and the refunds are going into the pockets of the privileged." Uh, does that mean that Boxer thinks that America's "gifts" are indulgences granted by the wealthy? Or, specifically, that our "gifts" are really all wealth redistributed from the welalthy by taxes? (I suspect the latter). (Registration required; link via OpinionJournal)

Arthur Silber of coldfury.com with some choice Ayn Rand quotes on McCarthyism.

Kathleen Parker on a lawsuit claiming that "eenie meenie miene mo" is an irretrievably racist phrase giving rise to liability for damages. She's not kidding, unfortunately.

I think I'd have to agree that, especially if I'm a prosecutor, I wouldn't want Bill Clinton on a jury.

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, a supporter of affirmative action, on why the debate over the Miguel Estrada nomination, particularly the debate among Latino groups, is yet another example of Bush destroying his political adversaries by doing exactly what they ask for:

This, then, is what the discussion has come to: a battle about who is Hispanic enough to warrant the racial preferences that most Americans oppose in the first place. What the Hispanic groups on both sides don't seem to understand is that, with all this infighting, they are managing to dismantle every single argument for affirmative action and making the case that race should play no role at all in public life.

* * *

[The attitude of Estrada's supporters who argue for him on the basis of his race regardless of his views] reflects several justifications for affirmative action: Break down racial barriers, remedy past discrimination, and create minority role models. All these arguments decline to look past skin color in the interest of getting the bodies onto the bench. But this argument has boomeranged badly in the past, not only because the Clarence Thomases have simply not been better for blacks than the David Souters, but because this kind of single-minded race-consciousness can only denigrate the minority in question. By ending the discussion at skin color, it sets up the implication that minorities succeed only because of preferences, that they couldn't have achieved such successes on their own merits. Could Miguel Estrada or any other minority candidate really sleep at night knowing that half his supporters would support a Honduran Hannibal Lecter as readily as they support him?

* * *

[The argument of opponents who say that Estrada is not a 'real' Hispanic because he is a conservative] decimates the only other justification for affirmative action (and the only one that now counts as a matter of law)—the argument that racial preferences automatically generate "diversity" of experience. To his detractors, Estrada's principal failing is that his privileged upbringing in Honduras and beyond were too "white" somehow—too Columbia and Harvard Law and Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher. He was not born in squalor, nor did he rise from the barrio. As a result, he does not represent the "Latino experience." By making this argument, Estrada's detractors are merely proving that race is indeed not a proxy for diversity—and that if you really want to guarantee diversity of experience, favoring minority candidates over poor or rural ones is the absolute wrong way to go.

Meanwhile, another racially charged issue that I continue to follow, the Washington Times points to some anecdotal evidence that Southern African-American voters may not be willing to embrace Joe Lieberman, because Lieberman is Jewish, has questioned affirmative action, is a longtime member of the DLC and has said nice things about Strom Thurmond. Quote from Al Sharpton: "They don't call themselves the Dixiecrats now; they call themselves the DLC." I've said all along that, contrary to the media's popular wisdom, the people most likely to hold Lieberman's Judaism against him are Sharpton and his African-American supporters, not conservative white Southern Protestants. The interesting question is whether Sharptonism and its fellow-traveler, anti-Semitism, will sell in the South as well as it sells in urban areas in the Northeast and the West Coast; the WaTimes points to bitterness over Cynthia McKinney's ouster, but remember that it was her own African-American constituents who dumped McKinney, and the same for Earl Hilliard. The counter-argument also focuses on the resovoir of good will for Lieberman having gone to Mississippi as a young 'Freedom Rider' in the Sixties, when it was legitimately dangerous to do so. I'm still not sure how it will all shake out, but without a real regional base, Lieberman will need to do well among African-American voters in the South if he wants the nomination.

Lord knows I'm no Noam Chomsky fan, but it still shocked me to read Chomsky's visceral contempt for Vaclav Havel and his gratitude to America at the collapse of the tyranny that ran Havel's country. (link via Instapundit)

Janeane Garafolo on why she's qualified to be taken seriously on issues of war and peace: "Now that I’m sober I watch a lot of news."

Joshua Micah Marshall has an interesting argument on why he thinks Dick Cheney is incompetent.

A great Goldberg File today, in defense of McCarthyism, then and now.

The Economist sums it up for all those who are reluctant supporters of war with Iraq:

"it would be wise [for the United States] to secure support for its threat through the UN, both to make the war less risky and to make the post-war peace more likely to be durable. But, in the end, the reality remains: if Mr Hussein refuses to disarm, it would be right to go to war. Saddamned, perhaps, if you do; but Saddamned, also, if you don't."

Count the uses of "I" by Bill Clinton in this item. Clinton even manages to make the death of Richard Nixon's press secretary about himself, saying that Ron Zeigler was "wise in the ways of Washington, and battle-scarred as I am."

Why am I not surprised that the mere existence in office of Jennifer Granholm has already pushed liberal writers to stump for abolishing the constitutional prohibition on foreign-born presidents?

Andrew Sullivan carries a reminder (second item) that it was also France who killed the League of Nations, in part by refusing to respect an oil embargo against Italy.

I asked here and here, in handicapping the Democratic presidential candidates, who would be the Mean Candidate. I think Mickey Kaus is right that John Kerry's addition of both Bob Shrum and Chris Lehane to his campaign team gives Kerry exactly the combination of advisers and temperament that produces the Gore-like candidate: mean, divisive, completely incapable of nuance or intellectual honesty, unwilling to concede even the possibility that the opponent and his supporters are anything but an eeeevil conspiracy. A successful candidate has to be tough and unsentimental about cutting the other guy's legs out from under him, to be sure, and this approach has had its successes in congressional and gubernatorial races. But a campaign like this is totally unsuited to attracting the broad middle in a presidential campaign. Why?

1. Presidential candidates have to look, well, presidential. The public knows a rabbit-puncher when they see one, and sometimes appreciates sending such people to Congress ("I'll fight for YOU to get money for OUR state and not send it to those big cities back East!"), but do people who think Bush isn't diplomatic enough really want our leader to be a Manichean populist?

2. The Shrum divide & conquer campaign style requires picking out the fissures in the electorate and living with the consequences of completely alienating everybody on one side of several of them. It's a lot easier to predict the consequences of that and wind up on the right side of the splits when you are dealing with a state or district; applied nationally, there are just too many ways to bet the wrong horse (think of Gore's alienation of gun owners and coal miners), and its logical conclusion is the candidate who wins landslides in culturally liberal precincts on the coasts but winds up getting screwed in the electoral college because he couldn't build a critical mass of support in any state that lacked a large urban African-American population (the one group that, for better or worse, will avoid being splintered by divisions on multiple wedge issues). Sound familiar?

Some time when I've got more time to blog, I intend to look more closely at the related issues of civility, intellectual honesty and mean-spiritedness in politics, media, punditry and blogging. But for now, I'll just say that adding Shrum gives Kerry the inside track at the nomination just as it pushes him further from electability by solidifying precisely the weaknesses that did in Gore. I can almost hear Kerry sighing already . . .

Ratings flop Phil Donahue accuses the American viewing public of being part of a right-wing cabal!

Well, actually he accused MSNBC of trying to imitate FOX by sacking him to hire more right-leaning talk show hosts, but Donahue apparently ignores the little matter of his flatlining ratings. Donahue's call for more patient management might ring truer if it were not for two facts:

1. His ratings weren't going anywhere. Donahue compares his situation to the time it took FOX to overtake CNN, but FOX was a whole new channel (people gotta find it on the dial) and it was trending sharply upward for a long time. Phil's show was stuck in the cellar with no prospect of improving.

2. I don't have figures, but you have to assume that Donahue's name recognition is still tremendous. Everyone knows who he is and that his show was out there; people just didn't want to watch it. No amount of time will change that. Sure, NBC gave a little-known show called "Seinfeld" time to build name recognition -- but there was no need to do that for, say, the Chevy Chase late night show; if it didn't start well, it wasn't going to get any better. Like Chase, Donahue just couldn't recapture the magic of the mid-seventies. He should have had the grace to just admit that. But in Donahue's world, it's always somebody else's fault.

Big Oil, maybe?

Pat Buchanan, who is nothing if not a believer in demographics as destiny, has some provocative insights about the toll of abortion on Russia's population.

Doug Turnbull has set out, at some length, a thoughtful explanation of why he thinks that the case for a space program is just as grounded in impractical romanticism as much of modern environmentalism:

Can anyone come up with an argument for manned space flight that couldn't, with a few changed words, also be used to support a ban on ANWR drilling, or almost any pro-environmental position, for that matter? Both seem to rest on a fundamental romanticism--in the one case of space, in the other of wilderness and wildlife here on earth. Both involve large economic costs to pursue this romantic goal, with either no economic payoff, or a highly questionable economic payoff in the distant future.

So why are so many of the same people who sneer at environmentalists' arguments about preserving wilderness, who happily whip out their cost benefit analysis thinking caps when such arguments come up, perfectly willing to jettison any semblance of rational thought or cost-benefit considerations when it comes to space exploration?

* * *
I’m more sympathetic to the environmental arguments, since the costs there (such as species extinction and habitat loss) are much clearer and more obvious than the supposed benefits of space flight, which seem to mainly focus on intangibles like the human spirit of conquest and exploration.

I've seen others make this point, and it's a fair criticism. Certainly much of the terms in which the space program is described by its admirers is explicitly aimed at our imagination rather than any hard grip on the day-to-day world the rest of us inhabit. Charles Krauthammer's stirring call to Mars is one of the best exemplars of this phenomenon.

In the end, though, I think that a fair distinction can be made between the two. Let's count the ways (albeit with a lot of overlap between my arguments):

1. The Costs of The Space Program Are More Explicit. The space program costs money, a lot of money; Turnbull pinpoints the cost of the Space Shuttle and International Space Station at $5.5 billion/year. But we can see that cost, and publicly debate it. The big problem conservatives have with environmentalism isn't the EPA's budget, which I suspect (without checking) is a good deal larger than NASA's. The problem is with all sorts of costs imposed by regulations on businesses, which impede economic growth in ways that are hard to measure and thus far less immediately subject to public scrutiny than NASA's budget.

2. The Costs of The Space Program Are Far Smaller. As I noted above, the cost of the space program as a whole is unlikely, in the near future, to exceed the very low 11 digits. Now, $10 billion may be a lot of money, but that's peanuts compared to the costs that would be imposed if we ever had to follow, say, the Kyoto Treaty.

3. The Space Program Places No Limits On Human Liberty. Costs aren't only measured in dollars. The space program costs us nothing but taxpayer money, and while I don't underestimate the cost of taxpayer money, environmental regulations impose other serious costs -- restrictions on businesses, impositions on communities and their livelihoods, barriers on the aspirations of working people who want to be self-sufficient.

4. We Don't Force Poor Countries To Have Space Programs. The environmental movement is forever trying to get the United States to insist on environmental restrictions on foreign countries, where people are trying to escape subsistence economies and raise standards of living to points that we take for granted in terms of our health and longetivity. The space program asks nothing of farmers in Zambia or the Amazon jungles, just the people who pay federal income taxes -- and we know who they are.

5. A Private Sector Space Program Would Be Even Better. Most conservative thinkers about space would gladly see a larger role for the private sector in the space program -- maybe not an exclusive role, but a larger one. Come to think of it, they're the same people who think that voluntary private sector efforts on the environment can be good for the economy. (Krauthammer, by the way, is quite explicit in explaining that he thinks government is just better at things like the space program that involve linear goal-driven projects rather than ham-handed attempts to screw with incentives in private conduct).

6. The Space Program Does Not Harm Our Sovereignty Or Infringe On Democratic Self-Government. Again, I get back to things like the Kyoto Treaty -- the environmental movement has made many efforts to get us to accept the dictates of international bodies our people did not elect. The space program makes no such demands, and instead proudly flies the American flag, even planting it on the moon (sorry, got a little emotional at the end there).

7. Space Has Military Applications. Now let's talk turkey -- as John Miller of the National Review noted (actually, I think he was quoting someone but I lost the article), space is "the ultimate high ground" -- by pushing our space program further, we can develop more military applications that have enormous usefulness in dangerous times. Miller's latest piece, on the use of Global Positioning Systems to improve the accuracy of our aerial bombardment and coordinate troop movements, underscores this.

8. Our Space Program Is Awe-Inspiring. I'm talking about the kind of awe that has practical uses: fear in the hearts of our enemies, respect of our friends. You can't buy the kind of propaganda, in the backward and dysfunctional societies where we must now seek to win hearts and minds and strike terror in those who wish to do so to us, than being the only nation ever to put a man on the moon. What that says to people who can't even get decent plumbing . . . it's incalculable. Mars? They can barely even see Mars.

But we can go there. And it will cost us much less than capping our smokestacks and reining in our standard of living.

There are few hardier perennials in the world of conservative journals of opinion than the article assuring us that, really, this time, Republicans are gonna start winning in California. It's right up there with "any day now, African-American voters are gonna wake up and realize that the Democrats take them for granted!" (The Wall Street Journal's John Fund is a master at both of these genres). Hugh Hewitt had a recent species of this in the Weekly Standard: Barbara Boxer's a loony leftist! Bush is gonna win the state! Hey, Cubs fans find a way to have hope each spring, so I guess California Republicans can too. Me, I'll believe it when I see it.

Here in heavily Democractic New York, though, I think Bush really can make inroads in 2004. My reasoning is simple:

1. Upstate New York has traditionally been good territory for the GOP, and Republicans have also proven competitive in the suburbs and on Long Island. In short, if Bush can neutralize Democrats' huge advantages in the City (in 2000, he lost Manhattan by more than a million votes), he's definitely in the game.

2. Voters in New York City have proven their willingness to vote for Republicans -- albeit more liberal ones than Bush -- when they feel their physical safety is at stake. Hence, we've had Republican mayors for the past decade.

3. Nobody cares more about progress in the War on Terror than New Yorkers. We're the City With The Big Bullseye, and everybody knows it. We were the opening battleground of this war. If Bush can convince people that he has made real progress on ths front by the fall of 2004 -- no major domestic terror strikes, Saddam gone, perhaps a new regime in Iran, maybe Osama's head on a spike -- he can be very competitive in the City, and maybe win the state.

It will all turn on the war -- but then, if the war is seen as going badly, Bush will be packing his bags in 2004 rather than counting electoral votes anyway.

ABC News' The Note has a fascinatingly detailed rundown on the Democratic presidential hopefuls in "The Invisible Primary".

The New Republic's Noam Scheiber has a great article (registration required) on the inside-the-Beltway pollsters and consultants who dictate the Democratic Party's message, and why Republicans' ideology prevents them from falling into the same trap.

As if I even have to tell you, don't miss Mark Steyn on that unilateralist cowboy Jacques Chirac, Jonah Goldberg on why liberal talk radio can't be funny, and James Lileks on sword-wielding Iraqi imams and the idiotarians who love them ("When [Tony] Blair shows up in the pulpit cleaving the air with a scimitar, let me know. . . It takes a particularly rarified variety of idiot to look at a Jew-hating fascist with a small mustache - and decide that his opponent is the Nazi.").

When a federal program finds that some 90% of applications are fraudulent, that's usually a sign that it was not well thought-out, no?

Political State Report notes a controversy in Michigan, where the state's Democratic Attorney General has refused to file a brief supporting the University of Michigan's racial preference program.

I just love our elected officials sometimes -- Reason magazine points out that many in Congress have been shocked to discover the draconian provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill -- even though they voted for it! (Link via NRO and Instapundit)

The Washington Post's allegation that GOP congressman Michael Oxley is using the threat of congressional investigations of the mutal fund industry to pressure the Investment Company Institute to hire Republicans as lobbyists does not reflect well on Oxley, to say the least.

Dick Gephardt formally announces that he's running for president (I was surprised to discover he hadn't announced yet), promising to raise taxes and create a massive new federal health care entitlement. Presumably, an endorsement from Walter Mondale is in the offing. Gephardt does stick by the president on Iraq, though, despite some silly carping about "the president's go-it-alone rhetoric."

In a not-unrelated story, Canada has basically admitted that the costs of its program of socialized medicine (just the costs, leaving aside the crummy services you get for all this money) will spin out of control over the next decade.

Political State Report has the rundown on Democrats lining up to unseat Illinois Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald in 2004.

Andrew Sullivan thinks Osama's trash talking is giving the U.S. military some good locker-room material before the big game (second item).

He's also got a quote from Eric Alterman wishing Rush Limbaugh had gone deaf, as well as a link to Rush's justifiably smug response. Put aside the politics and the radio here: Alterman is a big music buff (specifically, a Springsteen fanatic, which as far as I know is Alterman's only redeeming quality), and if he's ever actually listened to Limbaugh he'd know that Rush is a big music lover himself. And he wishes that Rush would have lost that joy forever in his life?

A NY Daily News investigation finds New York City school system educrats giving false information and browbeating parents who call a hotline for information about transferring their kids out of failing schools under the federal "No Child Left Behind Act."

Two INS employees in California have been indicted on charges that they "shredded as many as 90,000 applications in an effort to reduce the backlog of pending cases" last spring.

Democratic presidential candidates are hoist by their own petard in trying to campaign in a state they claim to be boycotting. Meanwhile, Peter Beinart says they will live to regret not confronting Al Sharpton. I still think Sharpton has major potential to have a falling out with the Democratic front-runner, especially if it's Lieberman (given Sharpton's long history of animosity with Jewish Democrats) and wind up killing the party in November. Even if Bush is looking to win in a walk, that could be disastrous for down-ticket Democrats, since Sharpton's supporters are more likely to stay home than to vote for Bush.

I still think this story, about Bill Clinton and Gorbachev recording a retelling of Peter and the Wolf that will "tell the story from the point of view of the wolf, faced with the encroachments of urbanisation on his dwindling forest habitat" has got to be a hoax. This is just beyond satire.

This story, about Princeton University cancelling a summer program for minority students over concerns that it might be illegal, actually disturbed me; I know the program is a benefit of sorts and its admission criteria are race-conscious, but this type of outreach falls on the side of the affirmative action line that we ought to be encouraging. (Either that, or this is the university equivalent of the 'Washington Monument strategy' - Princeton is trying to suggest that a ruling against the University of Michigan will kill all programs of this nature, which is just not so).

David Frum, one of the Bush Administration insiders who's often cited by those who think this Administration is too political, explains why the use of polls by the Bush team isn't in the same league with the Clintons. His example of the stem-cell controversy is a good one.

Ramesh Ponuru notes that Ted Kennedy got caught in a racial stereotype about Latinos.

REMEMBER WHEN A CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT IN 2000 DISENFRANCHISED VOTERS through an intentional campaign to interfere with their ability to get to polling places? Lots of people think they do; this is part of the regular litany of the 'black helicopter' crowd on the Left. But the New York Sun reports that one candidate actually did try to keep his adversary's voters from reaching the polls.

Dr. Manhattan has a great post - with links aplenty -- discussing the influence of Bill James on the thinking of 'warbloggers' including yours truly. I can't agree more - when I first read the 1983 Abstract (I was 11), James taught me how to think critically, a skill I regularly employ in my baseball columns, my blogging on war and politics, and my day job as a litigator. No one outside my immediate family has had a more profound impact on my life.

Two points:

1. Dr. Manhattan argues that "When you consider his methodology and the amount of BS he hacked through, Bill James has a valid claim to be the first “anti-idiotarian.”" I'd agree that he fits the profile, but no way is James the first - while it depends how far back you want to go in your intellectual histories, George Orwell would fit that description to a T, and would probably also be cited as a direct inspiration by many in the blogosphere, most notably Andrew Sullivan. Not only did Orwell take a buzzsaw to cant of all types, but he often used the 'Fisking' modus operandi, quoting and methodically demolishing the foolish notions of even the highest and mightiest (read his assault on Leo Tolstoy's pamphlet on Shakespeare, where he starts off picking apart Tolstoy's reading of King Lear and winds up indicting Tolstoy's entire life).

2. I've long wanted to expand on the parallels between sabermetric baseball analysts and political conservative media:

+Both distrust and despise mainstream media, especially the NY Times and network talking heads and their tendencies to echo each others' smug assumptions.

+Both often refer derisively to "conventional wisdom".

+Both took to the Web early, seeking to connect with like-minded people alienated by the mainstream media.

+Both have a near-unshakeable faith in logic, a suspicion of emotional decisionmaking, and a belief that their ideas will ultimately triumph.

+Both tend to rely heavily on principles of basic economics and statistics, with a little Social Darwinism (not the racial type, but the basic idea that better ideas will invariably prevail) thrown in.

+Both are heavily populated by males age 25-40, who were heavily influenced by ideas that have a long pedigree (ask John McGraw or Bill Buckley) but that came of age in the 1980s.

+Both rely heavily on sarcasm, wit and other sometimes impolitic but entertaining methods common to 'outsiders,' due in part to a lack of connections with those on the 'inside.'

+Both are often denounced by the 'mainstream' on charges of being disconnected from reality.

+The ideas of either are rarely confronted on the merits by mainstream analysts who take them seriously.

Believe it or not, there are people out there looking to draft Al Gore in 2004! Maybe they're still hoping he'll resolve this unanswered question. Well, except that nobody asks Democrats about that stuff.

Instaman spotted this entry noting a hilarious mangling of history by John Kerry.

This TIME magazine column suggests that Bush should abolish double federal income taxation of Social Security and Medicare taxes. It's a very persuasive argument, although like many of the arguments favoring sanctions and inspections in Iraq, it's funny how liberal writers only get enamored of this type of tax cut when they're trying to come up with an alternative to Bush's more vigorous proposals. Bush is looking for an economic shot in the arm, which - along with the argument that it will improve corporate disclosures - is why he's targeting the dividend tax. This proposal certainly belongs in the basket for the next round of tax cuts. Maybe this will go in the 2004 platform . . .

On Thursday, Slate ran a piece by Elise Boddie, a former Harvard Law classmate of mine, attacking President Bush's position on affirmative action. There are a few decent points here, but also several crucial fallacies. Let's walk through:

Bush still professes to favor racial diversity, but he opposes the use of race to create it. Sort of like saying that you like meatloaf but prefer preparing it without hamburger.

This does capture the mealy-mouthed nature of Bush's support for racial "diversity" as a permissible goal of a taxpayer-supported insitutions.

Bush claims there is another way, under his "colorblind" "affirmative access" proposal. This refers to the law adopted by Texas in the aftermath of the 1996 court ruling in Hopwood v. Texas abolishing race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas. Similar versions have been enacted by California and Florida. The Texas law mandates the admission to university of all high-school seniors graduating in the top 10 percent of their class; California and Florida give a boost to the top 4 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

Many commentators have already pointed out the glaring problems with these percentage plans—not the least of which is that their success in creating racially diverse student bodies at the college level depends in significant part on the continued racial segregation of the state's high schools. They also don't affect admissions in private universities or in graduate or professional schools; and, in California, there is no guarantee of admission to the state's flagship institutions. There is some indication that minority first-year admissions at Texas universities have increased under the percentage plan, following the post-Hopwood plunge. But such admissions have yet to reach the heights achieved in the years prior to Hopwood, and at least some of the increase is due to a rising college-age black and Latino population in Texas.

First of all, arguments that assume that the sole end goal of admissions policies should be to increase the proportion of students "of color" -- on a zero-sum basis -- are deeply problematic. Boddie then goes on to say that preferences aren't so bad because the number of white students who lose out isn't that high, although, presumably, it would rise in the near future "due to a rising college-age black and Latino population" in places like Texas.

Second, to object to the public university plans on the grounds that they assume large racial disproportion in high schools . . . well, yes. Racial disproportion -- segregation, if you want to call it that, although it's principally caused by housing patterns - is precisely what supports the argument that there's any need for affirmative action in the 21st century at all. African-American students who attend top high schools are hardly the oppressed and downtrodden in need of a hand, after all. The "percentage plans" are a Band-Aid aimed directly at the problem of students trapped in bad schools, and are designed to ensure that the best students from those schools get preferential treatment. It's still open to fair question whether this is in their best interests -- whether some students are getting promoted beyond what they've been academically prepared for -- but it's at least a solution that's designed to be proportionate to the problem.

[W]hile most of the public scrutiny concerning affirmative action has been on the qualifications of African-American and Latino students admitted to Michigan, it is scarcely mentioned that other white students are also admitted with SAT scores or GPAs lower than those of the plaintiffs (and lower than those of rejected minority applicants). Nor is much attention paid to the other racialized dimensions of Michigan's admissions policy that favor whites. The preference given to the children of alumni (including, incidentally, Patrick Hamacher, one of the plaintiffs challenging Michigan) disproportionately benefits whites, as does the enhancement given for candidates from Michigan's predominantly white Upper Peninsula, and the points awarded based on the quality of the candidate's high school and curriculum.

Well, the Upper Peninsula plan seems to be basically another form of the percentage plans, and it's presumably driven by in-state politics, which is a hazard of any public university. I would tend to agree that alumni preferences should be eliminated in public universities, however; they don't serve any academic purpose and they do institutionalize the past racial and other makeup of the student body. The main justification for such preferences in private colleges -- and I'm somewhat skeptical there as well -- is that alumni preferences help build loyalties that are essential to fundraising. Even if you buy that argument, it loses support when the college is financed by the state.

Opponents of affirmative action have spent the past two weeks repeating what seems to be their main, patronizing argument: that race-neutral admissions are better for racial minorities because affirmative action stigmatizes its beneficiaries as inferior (while at the same time denying their own agency in perpetuating such stereotypes). But the "stigma" is one-sided. It isn't applied to legacy admits; and it isn't applied to white Anglo Saxon Protestant men admitted to universities before the 1970s. Until affirmative action kicked in, these groups had a virtual lock on admissions at selective institutions because white women, blacks, Asians, and Latinos were either excluded from selective institutions altogether or were admitted in token numbers. Yet one never hears that this de facto affirmative action has "stigmatized" white males.

A funny thing about this argument is that it ignores the scorn usually heaped on George W. Bush for being a guy who would never have gotten into Yale without alumni preferences (see this Michael Kinsley article for a sample); conservatives tend to hurl the same stuff at Ted Kennedy. Of course, it may be unfair, but the main reason the stigma isn't more prominent is that you can't tell someone is a child of alumni just by looking at them. Still, I think most people knew some people in college who were clearly there just because their parents got them in. Also, go to any Ivy League campus and try to talk up a classical education in the Western canon and tell me there's no stigma attached to the writers for being dead white males . . .

In any event, this is a classic example of the false dichotomy set up by proponents of preferences -- between rich old-money WASPs and poor African-Americans. Meanwhile, your typical middle-class/working-class white kids, whose parents and grandparents got shut out of the old order, get told "meet the new privileges, same as the old privileges." And Jews and Asians need not apply.

Studies repeatedly document the continued pervasiveness of discrimination in housing, employment, health care, and in the criminal justice system, and the persistence of racial segregation in elementary and secondary education. President Bush and others who oppose affirmative action may well preach "colorblindness," but really they are just willfully blind to the continuing relevance of race.

Well, so make the case that "the continuing relevance of race" in those other areas is a bad thing - don't celebrate it as an excuse to give upper-middle-class African-American kids a leg up in admission to elite colleges.

Bob Novak reports that President Bush would have fired Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta - the Cabinet's token Democrat - months ago, except that Mineta has been ill and essentially left management of the department to underlings.

Charles Schwab stepped down as CEO of his firm Friday, while remaining on as chairman. This looks like just a sensible combination of corporate governance reform (Schwab's explanation) and the 65-year-old Schwab beginning the transition to the next generation of leadership for his company. But you do have to wonder, his denials to the contrary, if Schwab would be a candidate for public office. I assume from some of his public positions that he's a Republican, although whether a moderate or a conservative, I've no idea. But he's got huge name recognition and deep pockets.

In the end, probably the biggest hurdle is that he'll be 69 when Gray Davis' term ends. Guys like Schwab are generally better suited to be governors than senators. Still, in a California GOP desperate for winners, he'd be a guy worth talking to.

Man, the Democrat who did the response was a weenie. I mean, the response to the State of the Union is always miserable - I've felt sorry in years past for the pitiable responses the Democrats do, and I was incensed during the Clinton years at the weakness of Republican responses. It's not a partisan thing; it's just impossible to compete with the president on his big night. But the Dems picked a small state governor who's in serious political hot water back home. The response itself is an awful mishmosh; let's walk through it, skipping a phrase here and there:

Good evening. I'm Gary Locke, the governor of Washington state. It's an honor to give the response to President Bush on behalf of my family, my state, my fellow Democratic governors and the Democratic Party.

Note who comes last on the list. ("Mr. President, the Locke family has a bone to pick with you!")

My grandfather came to this country from China nearly a century ago and worked as a servant. Now I serve as governor just one mile from where my grandfather worked. It took our family 100 years to travel that mile. It was a voyage we could only make in America.

Yup, still talking about the Locke family.

Many of the young Americans who fought in Afghanistan, and who tonight are still defending our freedom, were trained in Washington state.

If Rick Perry said something like this, it would come off as, "Texas can kick Afghanistan's ass all by itself." Coming from Locke, it adds to the overall impression that the speech is more about "hey look at me, ma!" than anything the rest of the country cares about. Joe Sixpack just got up to get a beer.

But the war against terror is not over. Al Qaida still targets Americans. Osama bin Laden is still at large. As we rise to the many challenges around the globe, let us never lose sight of who attacked our people here at home.

Meaning, presumably, NOT IRAQ. And since when do we know for a fact that bin Laden is at large, as opposed to MIA/KIA? Who knows? GARY LOCKE KNOWS!

We also support the president in working with our allies and the United Nations to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il of North Korea. Make no mistake: Saddam Hussein is a ruthless tyrant, and he must give up his weapons of mass destruction.

Unless the French say we shouldn't do anything about it. Then, we would be making a mistake. But I get ahead of myself.

We support the president in the course he has followed so far: working with Congress, working with the United Nations, insisting on strong and unfettered inspections.

I suppose the "We" is now the Democrats, as opposed to the Locke family, but I could be wrong. Some of them sure didn't sound like they supported the course President Bush followed throughout 2002. But then, "yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone . . . "

Implied here, of course, is that when the going gets tough, "we" won't be so supportive.

We need allies today in 2003, just as much as we needed them in Desert Storm and just as we needed them on D-Day in 1944, when American soldiers, including my father, fought to vanquish the Nazi threat.

Back to the Locke family's need for international cooperation. As Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, the allies were a little more militarily important on D-Day than they are now.

He must convince the world that Saddam Hussein is not America's problem alone; he's the world's problem. And we urge President Bush to stay this course, for we are far stronger when we stand with other nations than when we stand alone.

"He," I guess, is the President (either that, or it's Locke's dad again). More seriously, it's amazing that the Democrats are still speaking in the future tense about this. The case has been made to the point of being a dead horse; granted, the president laid out some new allegations last night that will need to be backed by evidence before the Security Council, but anybody who's not listening by now is never going to. There's the same false dichotomy again between standing "with other nations" and "alone," ignoring the real possibility of standing with many nations but not all of them.

I have no doubt that together, we can meet these global challenges.

Except that we won't be behind you when the crap hits the fan, Georgie Boy. Then, you're on your own. Brave, brave Sir Gary!

Democrats have a positive, specific plan to turn our nation around.

To be fair, this is where I turned the radio off and read the rest this morning. If you read on, you will note that unlike the president's tax plan, the Democrats' is too "specific" to explain the specifics so the average American can understand what they actually plan to do. Just a general commitment to some undefined tax credits.

Some say it's a recovery, but for far too Americans, there's no recovery in our states and cities.

At this point, I get the sneaking suspicion he's talking about state and city governments.

There's no recovery for working Americans and for those searching for jobs to feed and clothe their families.

Ah, those "working Americans" again, as opposed to people who pay taxes on the income they make from . . . doing what?

States and cities now face our worst budget crises since World War II. We're being forced to cut vital services from police to fire to health care, and many are being forced to raise taxes.

Now, we've got the real gripe here, and the real reason they picked a governor. After all, when the Democrats in Congress vote to raise taxes, they can't well say that Bush is "forcing" them to do it. Of course, I assume that none of these states and cities spend money on anything less vital than police, fire and emergency health care.

Our plan provides over $100 billion in tax relief and investments, right now. Tax relief for middle class and working families immediately.

But we think that it's reckless for the president to ask for tax cuts to be accelerated. If the president's plan is too expensive, why boast about the size of your own? Me-too-ism stinks no matter which side of the aisle it comes from.

Substantial help for cities and states like yours and mine now. Extended unemployment benefits without delay for nearly a million American workers who have already exhausted their benefits.

More relief for governments! And we can't get the economy moving again if we've got a bunch of people around who want to work, can we?

President Bush has a very different plan. We think it's upside down economics; it does too little to stimulate the economy now and does too much to weaken our economic future. It will create huge, permanent deficits that will raise interest rates, stifle growth, hinder home ownership and cut off the avenues of opportunity that have let so many work themselves up from poverty.

Like the "permanent" deficits from the Reagan years, remember them?

We believe every American should get a tax cut.

Well, except that we're against any plans for tax cuts for some of those people, plus we were against the president's last plan to give everyone a tax cut. But other than that.

In 1999, an Al Qaida operative tried to enter my state with a trunk full of explosives. Thankfully, he was caught in time.

If only Gary Locke had been governor of New York, September 11 would never have happened!

Now, a year and a half after September 11th, America is still far too vulnerable. Last year Congress authorized $2.5 billion in vital new resources to protect our citizens: for equipment for firefighters and police, to protect ports, to guard against bioterrorism, to secure nuclear power plants and more. It's hard to believe, but President Bush actually refused to release the money. Republicans now say we can't afford it. The Democrats say: ``If we're serious about protecting our homeland, we can and we must.''

This sounds like a valid criticism, although there's more than this to many of the disputes over the routing of funds. But note that distributing some earmarked appropriations to Governors Like Gary Locke! is absolutely the only deficiency he identifies in our homeland security. Bold new ideas, this party has!

In my state we have raised test scores, cut class sizes, trained teachers, launched innovative reading programs, offered college scholarships, even as the federal government cut its aid to deserving students. Democrats worked with President Bush to pass a law that demands more of our students and invests more in our schools. But his budget fails to give communities the help they need to meet these new, high standards.

Same basic theme here: all would be peaches and cream, if only the president would send Gary Locke more money!

On this issue, the contrast is clear. Democrats insist on a Medicare prescription drug benefit for all seniors. President Bush says he supports a prescription drug benefit, but let's read the fine print. His plan only helps seniors who leave traditional Medicare. Our parents shouldn't be forced to give up their doctor or join an HMO to get the medicine they need. That wouldn't save Medicare; it would privatize it. And it would put too many seniors at too much risk just when they need the security of Medicare.

As usual, no proposal by Democrats to "save" Medicare, just load more freight on a sinking ship.

Environmental protection has been a tremendous bipartisan success story over three decades. Our air and water are cleaner.

Gee, now they tell us. Back in the Reagan years, there was nothing but bipartisan success on this issue! Says the Democratic Response! And they even admit that the sky is not falling!

But the administration is determined to roll back much of this progress.

How?

[I]nstead of opening up Alaska's wilderness to oil drilling, we should be committed to a national policy to reduce our dependence on oil by promoting American technology and sustainability.

I guess he missed the stuff about hydrogen cars; to be fair, I've always hated the fact that the "response" by either party just ignores whatever the president just said. Lawyers have to wing it on some details their closing arguments; can't politicians add a few things off the cuff? Just turn off the teleprompter for 30 seconds and talk turkey?

We will fight to protect a woman's right to choose, and we will fight for affirmative action, equal opportunity and diversity in our schools and our workplaces. Above all, we will demand that this government advance our common purpose and not pander to narrow special interests.

Do I even need to point out the contradiction in those two sentences?

This is not an easy time. But I often think about my grandfather, arriving by steamship 100 years ago. He had no family here. He spoke no English. I can only imagine how he must have felt as he looked out at his new country. There are millions of families like mine, people whose ancestors dreamed the American dream and worked hard to make it come true. They transformed adversity into opportunity. Yes, these are challenging times, but the American family, the American dream, has prevailed before. That's the character of our people and the hallmark of our country. The lesson of our legacy is, if we work together and make the right choices, we will become a stronger, more united and more prosperous nation.

Besides finishing the speech back under the shade of the Locke Family Tree, this closing stinks because it contradicts the gloom-and-doom substance of the speech. Locke wasn't selling hope here, he was selling Hard Times. If he was going to be consistent, he could at least mention how the McKinley Administration helped out his grandfather by giving block grants to the governor of Washington . . .

If Bill Clinton's presidency was X-rated for explicit sexual content, last night's State of the Union Address had to be at least PG-13 for graphic violence:

The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages — leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained — by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape.

Sometimes, the truth hurts. I'm obviously familiar with all this, but for a good number of viewers at home, it must've been jarring stuff; it was good to hear it all laid out.

On Iraq, Bush made it very plain that -- unlike Ted Kennedy, who fatuously insisted in post-speech comments that inspections were working and should be given more time -- the inspections game is over, and no more stock need be put in it:

U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them — despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them. . . . The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary; he is deceiving. From intelligence sources we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors, sanitizing inspection sites and monitoring the inspectors themselves. Iraqi officials accompany the inspectors in order to intimidate witnesses. . . . Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors are supposed to interview. Real scientists have been coached by Iraqi officials on what to say. Intelligence sources indicate that Saddam Hussein has ordered that scientists who cooperate with U.N. inspectors in disarming Iraq will be killed, along with their families.

Saddam might be given a little more time to have a "Scrooge on Christmas morning" type conversion between now and when the Security Council, following next week's meeting, comes to a resolution (I expect it will take 2-3 weeks). But Bush finally gave away his assumption that war is coming, despite his repeated recent protests that his mind wasn't made up yet:

[A]s we and our coalition partners are doing in Afghanistan, we will bring to the Iraqi people food and medicines and supplies — and freedom.

Granted, this is qualified by the prior sentence's "if war is forced upon us," but it sure sounded like the president knows this is coming now.

Other thoughts on the speech:

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Mac Thomason at Braves Journal notes a report that Dale Murphy may be running for Governor of Utah as a Republican.

I saw Gary Hart on CSpan the other night; he was before some highbrow audience bemoaning the fact that debates reduce candidates' positions to slogans. It's true as far as it goes, to a point, but:

1. Not if done well - the 2000 debates were quite substantive.
2. Except McCain, GOP politicos don't usually feel the need, preening before audiences who eat this stuff up, to complain that their elegant ideas are too complex to be grasped by the common man. Could you see Bush or Reagan doing that?
3. I bet John Edwards knows that you can cram plenty of substance into a 90-second sound bite.

First Al Sharpton for President, now Jerry Springer for Senate! What more could a Republican ask for?

George Will captures Howard Dean:

"Son of an affluent Long Island stockbroker (George W. Bush's grandmother was a bridesmaid at the wedding of Dean's grandmother), Dean attended private schools, then Yale, before moving to Vermont, a state whose most famous company is an ideological ice-cream maker (Ben & Jerry's) and whose one congressman, Bernie Sanders, is a New York-born socialist. Dean signed the law that made Vermont the first state to give legal standing to same-sex unions."

Jonathan Adler's able two-part defense of the SUV against attacks by Greg Easterbrook of the New Republic (part two is here) is persuasive on most points, but the central question is unanswered: is it right to have cars on the road that present, by their size, weight and high bumpers, such a high risk to others? Adler isn't really sure:

While shrinking SUV size might improve car safety, it is incontrovertible that increasing the weight of passenger cars by 100 pounds would almost certainly reduce highway fatalities by over 300 per year. These results are consistent with other studies, such as that by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety which concluded that "the high risks of occupants in light (and small) cars have more to do with the vulnerabiltiy of their own vehicles than with the aggressivity of other vehicles. "Traveling in a larger, heavier vehicle reduces your risk of being killed in a crash," notes Dr. Leonard Evans, president of the International Traffic Medicine Association. "There is no more firmly established conclusion in the vast body of traffic safety research." In other words, if the primary aim is to increase automotive safety, the Easterbrook's target should not be SUVs, but smaller, less-expensive cars. "Upsizing the car fleet may well be the most important step we could take toward improving safety," notes Sam Kazman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

To his credit, Easterbrook admits that federal studies make clear that "the most dangerous vehicles for their occupants are compact and sub-compact cars," not SUVs. He even suggests that the government should ban such "econo-boxes." Yet all this demonstrates is Easterbrook's willingness to tell other people what to drive. He evidently places little value on the ability of consumers to purchase the cars of their own choosing.

In other words, people driving smaller cars are risking their lives, but they should be able to make that choice. As a matter of theory that makes economic sense, and maybe I'm grouchy about this issue because I just had to buy a minivan after my car got totalled by a minor fender-bender with a high-riding SUV. But Adler doesn't really answer the question: assuming (as is the case) that many people drive small cars because that's all they can afford, shouldn't there be a greater burden placed on SUVs for the hazards they present to such drivers? (Granted, trucks present even greater risks, but trucks (1) serve a valuable economic purpose and (2) are subjected to stringent regulations, including a separate licensing regime). At a minimum -- and I don't know if this is true -- the auto insurance market should be made to internalize, for SUV drivers, the cost of accidents between SUVs and non-SUV vehicles.

In short, I'm sympathetic to Adler's individual-autonomy concerns, as well as to the more general sense in Easterbrook's pieces that people who drive SUVs in urban or heavily populated areas tend to be unreasonably aggressive drivers. There has to be a solution that lets people choose SUVs for their virtues while compelling them to bear the SUV's social costs.

Noemie Emery of The Weekly Standard thinks that NARAL's latest litmus fest has harmed the Democratic candidates who swore fealty to its agenda last week. Meanwhile, Stuart Buck has had a lot of useful thoughts lately about the politics and justice of abortion.

I actually rather like this proposal to relocate the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to August, to commemorate the March on Washington and the "I Have A Dream" speech.

If you wondered, as I have, who the mean candidate will be in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries, here's one early indication: Al Gore/Gray Davis hatchet man Chris Lehane signs on with John Kerry. Lehane was one of the people who, to me, symbolized the mindlessly partisan, tactics-oriented, soulless mean-spritedness of the Gore campaign. I mean, I'm all for negative campaigns, if it means holding the other side accountable for its follies, and every politician has weaknesses that can and should be exploited. But there's a certain breed of politico that instinctively goes for the cheapest shot possible, for the smear that takes 10 seconds to launch and works precisely because it takes more than one news cycle to get the truth out in return. The Republicans have some of those guys, to be sure - the worst example I can think of was Al D'Amato's 1998 campaign against Chuck Schumer, where D'Amato focused on preposterous attacks on the workaholic Schumer's attendance record in the House - but they seem to have gravitated heavily to the Democrats in recent years, and both Gore and Davis have hired nothing but these types of people, entirely eschewing anything that would resemble a positive, optimitsic message, a constructive solution, or an intellectually honest position.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems that if Democratic operatives, including Terry McAuliffe and Donna Brazile, are encouraging Carol Mosely Braun to run for president, their goal must either be to (1) undercut Al Sharpton or (2) generally fracture the African-American vote in a way that reduces its influence in the primaries. The former, at least, is a laudable goal. It's also possible that they are just eager to get the former senator out of the race against Peter Fitzgerald - their best bet for capturing a GOP Senate seat in 2004 - and afraid of the bad press in the black community if they just tell her to go take a hike.

I just have to recommend this City Journal Piece "How I Joined Teach For America -- and Got Sued For $20 million." A better illustration of the insanity of big city school districts, you could not invent.

Bob Novak's Saturday column had some good notes, including John Edwards ducking Tim Russert. Joe Lieberman was on Conan last night; I guess he's warming up for Leno and Letterman, who must shake their heads when they think of how their shows have become important stops for any aspiring Leader of the Free World. Want your finger on the nuclear trigger? First you have to sit down with this guy from Indiana who made his name wearing a suit of Alka-Seltzer and dropping bowling balls and watermelons off a tower . . .

Mark Steyn with a skewering of the Ted Kennedy apologia in the Boston Globe:

How many changed lives justify leaving Miss Kopechne struggling for breath for hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy's car? If the Senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Such a comparison doesn't automatically make its writer an a------, but it certainly gives one a commanding lead in the preliminary qualifying round.

But among the orthodox left the Clymer/Pierce view is the standard line: You can't make an omelette without breaking chicks. This is subtly different from arguing that a man's personal failings are outweighed by his public successes. Rather, they're saying that a man's personal flaws are trumped by his ideological purity, regardless of whether or not it works.

Liberal NY Daily News columnist Lenore Skenazy has some good lines in a piece on how New York will welcome the GOP convention in 2004 ("Starbucks introduces special convention drink: Trent Lattes. They're all-milk!")

Ryan Lizza at the New Republic blows the whistle on the scandalous truth about the Bush Administration's proposal to cut the dividend tax: turns out that it's all motivated by politics, because the Administration wants to help its chances for re-election by having a better economy in 2004! Where's an independent counsel when you need one? (Link via Andrew Sullivan)

Sullivan also cites a letter from a reader noting that Bob Graham will never win the Democratic nomination because he stands for Jim Crow, starving poor people, women in burkas and nuking cities for entertainment. OK, not literally, but he endorsed Reagan over Mondale in 1984, and for a big chunk of Democratic primary voters, it's the same thing (remember Al Gore torching Bill Bradley for some of his pro-Reagan votes in 1981?).

Of course, that's not the only old news from the 80s that may make a comeback. Remember Willie Horton, the convicted rapist who raped again while on a "furlough" from prison under the Dukakis administration? The furlough policy was one of such colossal idiocy that even Democrats (led by Al Gore, of course) used it against Dukakis in the primaries. Today, that whole story has been boiled down to "the Republicans were racist for mentioning the furlough issue because Horton was black," but it's still a legitimate issue -- and if memory serves correctly, Dukakis' lieutenant governor at the time was John Kerry.

Even though he's out of the race and the article is on another topic, Democratic insiders just can't stop bashing Al Gore:

Another source, noting that Lieberman gathered a lot of chits in 2000, added, "Most importantly, everybody remembers Joe brought life to a campaign that had none."

Another source contrasted Lieberman's post-2000 behavior to that of Gore. "Gore went to his house and shut the door for two years. Joe sent out thank-you notes to everyone and continued to raise money."

I may also be wrong about Lieberman's ability to connect with African-American voters:

A new CNN-USA Today Gallup Poll showed support for Lieberman among African-American voters, a key Democratic constituency. Lieberman even outpolled civil rights activist Al Sharpton. Lieberman spent a lot of time rallying support in black churches during the 2000 campaign. Said one long-time activist, "Lieberman went to Mississippi during the height of the civil rights movement. People remember things like that."

Al Sharpton is a grizzled veteran in playing the anti-Semitism card, and he skillfully eviscerated the past campaigns of Bob Abrams (1992, Senate) and Mark Green (2001, NYS mayor). But maybe I'm being too pessimistic about whether that will fly. There's certainly evidence that African-American voters in the South aren't buying that particular brand of snake oil anymore; witness the primary defeats of Cynthia McKinney and Earl Hilliard, both of whom played the "J-E-W-S" card (as McKinney's father put it) with reckless abandon against their (black) opponents.

Well, I can take some satisfaction in having predicted that Tom Daschle wouldn't run for president. NRO noted that South Dakota law would have prevented him from running for re-election to the Senate in 2004 if he'd run. I think the bigger motivator was the fact that he'd have to give up the Senate minority leadership for a long-shot bid. The fact that he considers that a big loss suggests that he's in no danger of a mutiny in his own ranks (which is unsurprising; his number 2 is a colorless loyaltist, Harry Reid, and except for Chris Dodd, most of the potential challengers are looking to the White House). Meanwhile, Dick Gephardt is leaving the House after 2004; that was inevitable once he left his leadership post, and if he's not elected president this is as good a time as any to leave the arena and go make some money for a few years.

I still think that this whole EU consititutional convention is an underreported story. The ultimate structure and allocation of powers in the new Europe could have a profound effect on the freedom and prosperity of what remains one of the world's most important regions, with millions of people and a huge economy. Plus, it's a deliberate experiment in political philosophy to rival that of 1787 in our own country. I suppose there will eventually be a massive debate on the whole project in Europe, but why don't we hear more today?

The Washingtonian's Capital Comments had loads of interesting items this month, including continuing rumors about Orrin Hatch as a Supreme Court candidate, a rundown on the potential First Lady candidates among the Democratic wives (I hadn't known much about Elizabeth Edwards, for example), and Grover Norquist's quest to name stuff after Reagan ("Norquist keeps a list of geographic sites with names, such as Squaw Valley, that Native American organizations object to: “We talk to the tribes and tell them, ’Hey, it’s no problem. We have a substitute name ready.’").

This comment about Daschle's wife from some meathead lobbyist irritated me no end: “Rush [Limbaugh] and his ilk can’t stand the fact that she’s a good-looking woman with a brain.” This is typical Dem-speak; criticize a man for the fact that his wife is a lobbyist for Big Bidness, and it must be because you are somehow threatened by intelligent women. Nothing conservatives say can possibly be taken at face value, while women in the Democratic party must at all times be insulated from the scrutiny that attends everyone else. Ask yourself: does Rush get offended by good-looking women with brains who are conservative Republicans (Condoleazza Rice is the most obvious example)? Does he heap scorn on Republicans with active or outspoken wives (Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell, Phil Gramm)? If not, isn't it possible that his real concern is ideology, not gender? Nah, couldn't be that. It's not possible that anyone would dislike Hillary Clinton because of her politics, for example. Who could disagree with her?

I got quite a laugh out of Rich Lowry's column on how the Dallas Cowboys are catching heat for hiring Bill Parcells without interviewing African-American candidates. I mean, could the proponents of race-counsciousness in the hiring of coaches pick a worse battle? This sounds like something PETA would do. There are only a handful of other coaches with similar qualifications to Parcells, and most of them (like Don Shula) are old and retired. None are black. Dennis Green? Green's got a decent resume - a lot of playoff appearances despite a perennial revolving door at QB, but also a lot of playoff failures. Parcells, he's not, any more than Randall Cunningham was John Elway.

At any rate, if people are serious about affirmative action in the NFL, their campaign should focus on getting more African-Americans considered for posts as offensive and defensive coordinators, which is the key stepping-stone job into the head-coach network, plus there are twice as many of those jobs and they open up more frequently. (Also, you can't fairly compare a guy with head coaching experience, whatever it may be, to a guy without any; the decision to hire an experienced coach is common in risk-averse organizations, and makes sense in some situations.)

The New Republic, desperate for a fresh New Democrat voice, thinks Florida Senator Bob Graham will be a strong presidential candidate in 2004. I have to say, his argument that we shouldn't limit the fight to Iraq makes a heck of a lot of sense. TNR makes a few good points in his favor.

Graham at least has a rationale for running ("Floridian serious about foreign affairs"), as do Lieberman ("centrist hawk"), Edwards ("champion of Regular People"), Sharpton (I don't have to explain this one), Dean (pure leftism, undistilled), and to some extent Kerry ("He'll Keep Us Out Of Vietnam - war veteran who speaks as voice of multilateral diplomatism"). The guys who don't are Daschle, Gephardt, and some of the darker horses like Biden. It's what killed Bob Dole; the leaders of the party in congress have to keep their lips simultaneously planted on so many behinds, and spend so much time immersed in procedural tangles, that it's impossible to distinguish themselves as unique spokesmen for any point of view.

Graham running would pull votes about equally from Edwards, as the electable southernor, Kerry, as the Master of Gravitas, and Lieberman, as the hawk, and most of all would destroy the dark horse Gary Hart and Wesley Clark ideas.

OK, it's time for the pundits, amateur and professional, to start handicapping the Democratic primary race. At the end of the day, the winner will need to be at or near the top in (1) raising money, (2) winning over the the African-American vote; (3) endorsements from AFSCME, and (4) endorsements from the teacher's unions. If one candidate takes all four, they win automatically, no matter their electability, charisma or press notices (See Mondale, Walter).

Here's my power ranking:

1. Edwards. The Kennedy/Clinton youth/electability thing, the populism. Needs to avoid the Big Gaffe and prove he can raise the big dollar, although he should do well raising money from the plaintiffs' bar. Left-wing voting record will reassure the unions.

2. Kerry. Fairly well embodies the party line. Deeeep pockets. Looks presidential. Kwise Mfume of the NAACP thinks Kerry will get the nod.

3. Gephardt. Has run before, knows the ropes. Many people owe him, will raise money effortlessly, and nobody has stronger ties to labor. Not to be underestimated for his lack of charisma, but pro-Bush Iraq vote was seen as treason by party faithful and undercut many of the Senate Democrats who wanted to tie the issue up in procedural knots.

4. Graham. Boring, neurotic, no name recognition, and Democratic primary voters won't go for the guy who sounds like a unilateral hawk. But he can win South Carolina and everyone knows he'll be competitive in Florida, which would give him serious momentum.

5. Dean. Governors still have some advantages, especially when the base thinks the DC establishment has sold them out, and the whole establishment is running. New Hampshirites know him and love quirky guys. Prepare for the Goldwater/McGovern/Mondale comparisons: Dean would strip the party down to the base. A Dean candidacy would be the worst outcome for Hillary '08, since it would create a backlash against northeastern liberals and pressure to try a Southern centrist.

6. Lieberman. Technically the front-runner, I guess, but urban African-Americans just won't go for him, and neither will the tye-dye Leftist types who think he's a puppet of Generalissimo Bush. Sharpton will kill him, because he will go after Lieberman relentlessly if he looks like he's going to pull ahead.

7. Field (includes the total chances of Hart, Biden and numerous others, including a draft-Hillary movement, a Gore reversal, Wesley Clark, Chris Dodd, Gray Davis, Jerry Brown (he's more likely due to run again in 2008), Tom Vilsack, Evan Bayh, and Lord knows who else). Hey, you never know.

8. Daschle. I still don't think he'll run; he's everyone's favorite scapegoat, and he doesn't stand for anything or anyone in particular. Gephardt will KO him in Iowa if he runs.

9. Sharpton. Will create havoc and will win a primary somewhere with 27% of the vote, I suspect, but the Democrats aren't this stupid.

Andrew Sullivan notes that John Edwards' repetitions of the phrase "regular people" indicates that he's moving away from the phrase "working families," a Democratic staple the last few years. The term, when tied solely to the lower tax brackets, always galled me - the Democrats seem to think that people who work 40 hours a week are "working people," but people who work 80 hours a week aren't. But aside from that, I wonder if the new term suggests that the new Democratic linguistic orthodoxy is moving away entirely from the term "family," in light of Al Gore's book-length argument for a new conception of the term?

One of the hallmarks of a good politician is consistency of message, which includes using consistent terminology. But always beware of people who refuse to call a thing by any but one chosen name - this is often a sign of the use of language as a shield against the encroachment of free and open debate.

Instapundit, among others, has been running an extensive list of links lately on John Edwards; check them out. One I would highlight is this New Republic item noting that Edwards may be running now, rather than waiting until he's more seasoned, because he's in danger of not being re-elected in North Carolina, a conservative state where he won with 53% of the vote in 1998, a Democrat-friendly year and one when the ballot was not headed by a popular Republican president running against (assuming Edwards doesn't get the nod) what is likely to be a liberal northeasterner. Edwards' voting record is very liberal himself; he's seen as a moderate mostly because he's from North Carolina. On the other hand, if Edwards runs a decent campaign but loses the nomination - like Gore in 1988, for example - he could announce that he's not running for re-election, and plot for a later moment to run for Governor if he wants to build his White House resume. Or he could just be an arrogant SOB who thinks nobody can say no to his charm. Lawyers have been know to fall for their own BS before.

Like most Republicans, I fear Edwards more than any of the other Democratic candidates - he's pretty, he's a Southerner, and he's awfully slippery. (The guy I fear the least, other than Al Sharpton or a nonentity like Howard Dean, is John Kerry, an able campaigner with a good biography and a deep war chest but a guy who will be incredibly easy to pigeonhole as an elitist Massachusetts liberal). On the other hand, don't forget that no sitting member of the House or Senate has been elected President in living memory, though many have tried. If you count Bob Dole, who resigned after locking up the nomination, the last three to get the nomination are him, McGovern, and Goldwater - not the best track record (throw in John Anderson if you're counting major third party runs). The last southern congressman to run in November was Strom Thurmond. Comparisons to Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter are off-base, because they ran as governors; Edwards is in a Senate minority jammed with presidential contenders; his fellow Democrats won't bend over backwards to help him (word is, as the junior Dem he may be shoved off the Judiciary Committee, which will lose him the chance to grill Supreme Court nominees on national television), while Republicans in the Senate are sure to look for opportunities to put Edwards, Kerry, Daschle, Biden, Graham, Lieberman, Hillary!, Dodd, and anybody else who comes to mind on the record as often as possible with politically uncomfortable votes on taxes, partial-birth abortion, etc. Bet your buttons that Edwards' record on tort reform issues will be closely watched.

We also, except for Gephardt, Sharpton (a veteran instigator of internecine warfare) and super-longshot maybe-candidate Gary Hart, haven't seen how any of the Democratic contenders will fare under 'friendly' fire in a presidential primary, or how they will dish it out. Who will show a glass jaw, like Bill Bradley, Ed Muskie and Bob Kerrey in campaigns past? (My bet's on Daschle). Who will show a Gore-like thirst for the jugular? (Kerry's nasty but not really a street fighter; Edwards may prove meaner than we think). Who will drop out gracefully in the early going (I bet on Daschle again - I think he won't run), and who will stay in the race after he's dead, throwing bombs (Sharpton will, but will someone else fill Jerry Brown's 1992 role?). One reason for Dems not to get too high too early on Edwards is that unlike Clinton, he has to climb over a mountain of prominent party veterans; say what you will, except for Hillary and Gore we are likely to see the best the Democrats have to offer in this campaign.

Hillary, of course, is another reason why Edwards may be in a hurry. The 2004 field may be crowded, but she's made it quite clear that she's running in 2008 and not before. That gives everybody else a tremendous motive to get out of her way, given her fundraising network, her tremendous popularity with party faithful, and the fear of being branded a he-man-woman-hater if you criticize her.

At this point, it's more newsworthy when Democratic Senators announce they're not running for president. The candidates should form their own caucus; by now, they've got more members than the CBC.

National Review Online today had a useful note of caution: don't fail to take John Edwards seriously.

I don't usually link to Pat Buchanan, but Pitchfork Pat was present at the creation of Nixon's 'Southern Strategy,' and he has a few words for its critics:

Richard Nixon kicked off his historic comeback in 1966 with a column on the South (by this writer) that declared we would build our Republican Party on a foundation of states rights, human rights, small government and a strong national defense, and leave it to the "party of Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice." In that '66 campaign, Nixon -- who had been thanked personally by Dr. King for his help in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957 -- endorsed all Republicans, except members of the John Birch Society. In 1968, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew for V.P. Why? Agnew had routed George ("You're home is your castle!") Mahoney for governor of Maryland but had also criticized civil-rights leaders who failed to condemn the riots that erupted after the assassination of King. The Agnew of 1968 was both pro-civil rights and pro-law and order.

The incomparable Mark Steyn: the "sub-Carvillian hit-job on Trent Lott's replacement, Bill Frist, is even more pathetic than usual, resting as it does on the notion that attacking Marion Barry is an obvious 'racial code.' If Democrats really want to take the view that an incompetent crackhead is beyond criticism because of his race, then feel free."

Charles Rangel calls for a return to mandatory military service. Now, I don't dismiss out of hand the possibility that this may be necessary at some point, although it doesn't seem at the moment that a lack of manpower is our primary national security problem. But Rangel doesn't even pretend to be talking about national security needs:

The Korean War veteran has accused the Bush administration and some fellow lawmakers of being too willing to go to war with Iraq. . . . "When you talk about a war, you're talking about ground troops, you're talking about enlisted people, and they don't come from the kids and members of Congress," he said. "I think, if we went home and found out that there were families concerned about their kids going off to war, there would be more cautiousness and a more willingness to work with the international community than to say, 'Our way or the highway.'"

This captures perfectly why people don't trust the Democrats, as a party, to deal seriously with wartime issues. Rangel wants to make a political point, and in many ways a racial point (he 'explained' his vote against war with Iraq as being based on the fact that there were too many African-Americans in the military) - and to do it at the expense of having a serious policy on national security. Disgraceful. And, of course, a racially charged argument like this is a hand grenade thrown into the foxholes of the various Democratic political contenders, most of whom will likely show the courage of their convictions by trying to ignore it.

Mark Steyn with a great column on David Ahenakew, the Native Canadian "leader" whose pro-Hitler remarks have provided a mirror image on the Trent Lott controversy for the left north of the border:

Re-run the video of Strom Thurmond's birthday party: After the usual Viagra and Hooters gags, Senator Lott says he's proud his state voted for Strom in 1948. There's a bit of nervous laughter -- it's audibly different from the Viagra yuks -- because the crowd can sense this is a step in a direction most of them don't want to go. Strom himself has long since disavowed his segregationist past. And then Lott goes and says, if Strom had won, we wouldn't have had all these problems we'd had over the years. And that nervous laughter dies. You can hear an intake of breath. The audience understands a line has been crossed.

Nothing like that happened at that FSIN meeting. Mr. Ahenakew was supposed to be addressing health issues but lurched off instead into his historical digression. And the crowd took it in their stride, as if it's perfectly routine for their "respected elders" to start droning on about how the Jews started the Second World War. The sense of when a code has been breached is very important to a society's health. Senator Lott did not call for the return of lynching. He didn't say that the sight of those fellows hanging from trees taught an important lesson to uppity Nigras. But, even so, his audience understood. Mr. Ahenakew's didn't, and that speaks poorly for them, and their grubby third-rate leaders . . . FSIN Vice-Chief Lawrence Joseph blames the media: "It's f---ing garbage. What was your intent to print that story?" he told the paper. "It should not have even been pursued."

* * *

State-funded Jew-hating Syrians are pro-Syrian. But state-funded Jew-hating Canadians, like Mr. Ahenakew, hate Canada, too. What a fine testament to our tolerance: Our intolerant bigots are intolerant even of us, and we don't mind! In fact, we encourage it! Fire on law enforcement, and we back away, promising to be more "sensitive" in our policing. The Supreme Court of Canada in its April 23rd 1999 ruling that judges must pay "particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal offenders" all but formalized the de facto two-tier justice system. If Mr. Ahenakew ever did get to "fry" six million Jews, the Supreme Court would rule the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal an infringement of his aboriginal rights and insist that he can only be brought before a First Nations "sentencing circle."

Kathleen Parker, on the other hand, notes that at least in the U.S., hate speech like Mr. Ahenakew's is legal - and why that's a good thing.

The Trent Lott saga is over, a week after it should have ended, as Lott steps down as Majority Leader but will remain in the Senate. The finishing blow for Lott seems to have been the decision by one of his two chief rivals, conservative stalwart Don Nickles, to throw his support behind the White House's favored candidate, outgoing National Republican Senate Committee Chairman Bill Frist. Our good friend Larry said about a week ago that Lott would last until today, so he gets the prognosticator's prize.

In a way, the conservative furor over Lott reminds me of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, in which he talks about cops and prosecutors in the Bronx, sick of taking race-related heat for prosecuiting so many African-Americans and Latinos, and their excitement at finally getting their hands on "the Great White Defendant." I've about beaten this issue to death here - I'm hoping to "move on," like the man said - but a lot of the visceral reaction from conservatives was the opportunity to show that we are not, in fact, the racist lynch mob that the Democrats and their media allies would have people believe. And how better to prove that - and also, how better to prove that we're not like the sycophantic Democrats who rallied around Clinton when he finally got caught - than to take down one of our own?

As to the likely new Majority Leader, my all time favorite Frist quote is from the press conference when he took over the NRSC two years ago:

"I spent every day for twenty years waking up, training in the morning, working through about every other night for one thing, and that is to be within forty-five seconds, within forty-five seconds, to be able to cut out the human heart." After some uncertain laughter among his leadership colleagues, Frist added, "Under anesthesia."

Funny how this controversy, like most other political and international controversies over the past three years, has worked itself out exactly the way George W. Bush wanted it to. Branch Rickey - whose fingerprints are also on this particular controversy, if you think about it - used to say that "Luck is the residue of design." Bush gets lucky way too often to assume that it's coincidental.

Meanwhile, Drudge picked up on a report of a Democratic Senator with kind words for someone much worse than Strom Thurmond circa 1948. Will this story have legs? Probably not, especially coming the Friday before Christmas, but it's a nice reminder of the kind of thinking that does not deserve to hold responsible positions of authority.

The Weekly Standard, doing its share of the all-Lott-all-the-time routine, has two priceless quotes.

Frederick Douglass: "There never was yet, and there never will be, an instance of permanent success where a party abandons its righteous principles to win favor of the opposing party."

On Jan. 28, 1931, in the House of Commons, Winston Churchill expressed his disgust at Ramsey MacDonald's government: "I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as the 'Boneless Wonder.' My parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing to my youthful eye, and I have waited 50 years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench."

Conservatives and Republicans are right to be indignant at Lott, and we're now seeing examples of precisely why.

EXHIBIT A: You knew if the race cards were being played somewhere, Bill Clinton would pull up a chair and say, "deal me in and I'll raise you."

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America's news service, the Voice of America, carries the Bush vs. Trent Lott story to the world - but note the headline here: "Bush Rebukes Senate Leader Over Racially Sensitive Remarks." Shouldn't it be racially insensitive remarks?

Another sign of bad news for Lott - I get the RNC's "eChampions" emails, and the latest one (Friday) prominently touted Bush's rebuke to Lott (but said nothing about Lott's apologies). When your own party is looking to get distance from you in its mailings to party faithful, that's bad news.

National Review publishes an open letter from the incoming Republican majority leader of the Colorado state senate, calling for Trent Lott to be replaced. His conclusion: "I can't forget my experience 30 years ago during Watergate. As a young Nixon staffer torn between partisan defensiveness and principle, I learned the importance of not letting ourselves be paralyzed from holding our own leaders to a high standard, merely because we are so offended by the motives and methods of those on the other side who are howling for blood. The hypocrisy of Lott's enemies in no way excuses the wrongness of his statements. Republicans can find a better Majority Leader. We should do so."

What the writer neglects to mention - though as a Watergate-era staffer he must remember it - is that while many GOP leaders took sides against Nixon in that battle, one of the GOP congressmen on the House committee to vote consistently against the would-be impeachers was Mississippi congressman . . . Trent Lott. Of course, Lott wasn't the only one; George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole were also among the bitter-enders defending Nixon. But the parallel is telling: in 1973, Lott didn't know when it was time to tell a Republican president when to leave, and in 1998, he wasn't willing to pitch a battle to tell a Democratic president when to leave. In 2002, he hasn't shown any awareness that it's his time to leave.

(UPDATE: Dave Kopel's companion piece on NRO points this out as well, noting that Lott did eventually vote to convict Clinton after having hobbled his trial, and noting that Thurmond did the same after having defended Nixon to the bitterest end).

More albatross hunting: Glenn Reynolds on Henry Kissinger and Michael Bellesiles plus a roundup including links to a funny take on Gore.

THE CURSE HAS BEEN LIFTED, THE STONE REMOVED, THE LIGHT HATH COME SHINING THROUGH ON THE WARM GREEN GRASS! HOPE SHALL SPRING AGAIN!

This weekend was open season on albatrosses, and I'll have more on the rest later (for starters, Andrew Sullivan has some good shots at Al Gore, Trent Lott and Cardinal Law). But I loved the opening of the NY Daily News' writeup on the most indefensible of the bunch:

Rey Ordoñez's late-September declaration that Mets fans are "stupid" proved to be his final act as a member of the team. The shortstop was dealt last night to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, a team short on fans.

It's the real Al Gore!

Somehow, the fact that Dick Morris vouches for Trent Lott ("I have known Lott for 15 years and have had, perhaps, a hundred or more meetings with him. I got to know him better than any American politician other than Bill Clinton") doesn't help. Morris on Strom: "His current senility is a vast improvement."

VH1's "Behind the Music" should get to work on The Singing Senators. Even Milli Vanilli didn't break up this spectacularly.

Lord knows I'm no fan of Al Gore, but the opening paragraph of this item is just a horrendous piece of pop-psychoanalysis masquerading as a 'news' article:

Al Gore, the defeated presidential candidate in 2000, has indicated to friends he is to abandon the quest to become president that his domineering father urged on him as a child.

Indeed, one of the reasons why Gore thinks the media has a conservative bias is because the media in general have been very hard on Al Gore. In most cases fairly, I should add; in some cases unfairly and in others too soft on Gore by a long shot. But Gore's perspective on the media is first and foremost shaped by how they treat him.

The National Review Online continues its saturation coverage of the Trent Lott story with a blaringly headlined editorial calling on Lott to resign as Republican Senate leader, and noting that NR had called for Lott's head four years ago. The succinct statement of Lott's moral culpability:

Minority leader Tom Daschle's initial reaction . . . to Lott's remarks was essentially sound — Lott misspoke. But Lott misspoke in a particular way, one freighted with symbolic significance. Many southern whites of a certain generation have a shameful past on civil-rights issues. This doesn't necessarily make them reprehensible people, or mean that they are racists today. But, when they are public figures, it is reasonable to expect from them an honest reckoning with their past, and, of course, an awareness that a reckoning is necessary.

This is basically the same point the Supreme Court seemed to be leaning towards making in the cross-burning arguments this week: sometimes, words and symbols have a history, and you invoke that history at your peril. That's why being a Nazi is merely scorned in the United States, but illegal in Germany.

The Wall Street Journal also essentially asks Lott to step down. It's not entirely accurate, as the Journal suggests, to say that conservatives led the charge against Lott's remarks, but certainly many more conservatives outside of politics piled on the issue early than did liberals in journalism or the other usual sites of outrage. The Journal also strangely suggests that John Kerry has been the most vocal of the Democrats' presidential hopefuls on this, which he hasn't; to his credit, albeit with his usual smarmy overstatement, Al Gore was 'fustest with the mostest' in this fight. Peggy Noonan also has a wonderful column accusing Lott of playing the race card and telling him to go; it's worth reading in its entirety.

On the legal front, I have to think the number one casualty of the Lott brouhaha is Charles Pickering. George W. Bush has suggested that some of the judicial nominees killed in committee - namely, Priscilla Owen, the Fifth Circuit nominee who became a key issue in the Texas Senate campaign - would be revived, and with Pickering's son elected to the House from Mississippi and Lott stepping back up as majority leader, it seemed like Pickering would be back too. But Pickering is a white Mississippian, he was charged with racial 'insensitivity,' he was basically sponsored by Lott, and in the current circumstances, that combination will almost certainly make him too hot to handle. It's unfair to him, but that's the way it goes; at least he's still got that life tenure as a US District Judge.

Drudge is reporting that Trent Lott has scheduled a 4:30 press conference today in Pascagoula Mississippi. Looks like Instaman's prediction of a Friday afternoon resignation is gonna come through on the nose. Politicians tend to announce things like this on their home turf.

Mary Matalin is leaving the White House. With her ties to the disastrous Bush/Quayle '92 campaign and her marriage to James Carville, Matalin has always been viewed with some suspicion by conservatives. She seems personally likeable, but she will not be missed.

The Trent Lott pig-pile continues, with the President jumping aboard. Now TIME magazine reports that Lott fought successfully as a college student to keep his fraternity segregated. It's time to step down.

OK, I've had Trent Lott on the brain this week - as Rick Brookhiser points out on NRO, Justice Thomas' comments were probably triggered in part by the same thing - but I've got to pass on the link you can use to do something, especially if (like me) you are in a state with no GOP senators. (In fact, New York borders on five other states, four of which also have no GOP senators). You can send a message to the RNC here. Here's what I wrote:

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Jeff Jacoby has a good column on Trent Lott. But he's hardly alone, even (or especially) among conservative commentators; Instapundit has a lot of the links, but they're damn near everywhere on the Right and among the blogs. More interesting is this American Prowler item, which is the first sign that Republicans on Capitol Hill may be getting the message. (Black conservatives have also been on the march; see here). Meanwhile, the New York Times continues ignoring the story, while its columnists argue that dumping Lott is pointless because all Republicans are Dixiecrats at heart. This type of smear job is precisely why so many conservatives, Republicans, and conservative fellow-travelers (i.e., guys like Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan who lean conservative on more issues than not) have gone ballistic on this issue: because it gives ammunition to people who want to argue that we are all Jim Crow Dixiecrats in disguise. That's personal, and it's deeply offensive.

I saw on the CNN crawl on Saturday, "Bush picks Friedman to head Council of Economic Advisers" and the only Friedman I could think of was Milton. Who's perfect for the job, except he's about 93 years old.

Questions about his new pick for SEC chairman. Of course, virtually anybody who's been a corporate CEO has been named in a class-action lawsuit, and believe you me, the fact that such a lawsuit is filed - by itself - is absolutely no reason to believe that there has been wrongdoing. I didn't have a high opinion of securities class actions when I was in law school, but after practicing in this area for more than six years, I've often been shocked at how little merit is behind many claims.

Of course, pointed questions about the issue are perfectly fair game; we don't need any unpleasant surprises. And I'm not, myself, familiar with the lawsuit in question. But the favorable quote from Chuck Schumer in this story seems to support the idea that Donaldson is not really in any trouble at this point.

Click here if you want to express your support for Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate.

PejmanPundit thinks that Bush has to stay out of the Senate Republicans' hair in deciding whether to dump Trent Lott. I agree that there are risks, and Bush needs to avoid being too publicly associated with a dump-Lott move, but he can clearly make a major difference by signalling privately the importance to the national party of replacing Lott.

Daniel Drezner on Paul Krugman: "His effect on [public] discourse would be more positive if he contributed less frequently." I couldn't agree more. Today's column by Krugman, though, is a sample of what the GOP is in for if Trent Lott isn't removed as leader: The Krug argues that any opposition to massive federal entitlement programs must be explained only by racism.

Right Wing News on Trent Lott: "Lott's remarks were so idiotic that I'm finding myself inclined to agree with Al Sharpton."

Not a lot of support out there on the net for the Trentser, lemme tellya.

Orrin Judd thinks the logical successor would be Dr. Bill Frist of Tennessee, who chaired the Senate Campaign Committee that helped elect all those new GOP Senators. Frist's a great choice, has tremendous ties to the White House, and a guy with instant credibility on healthcare issues to boot (he's a heart surgeon).

Instapundit, of course, has been nearly all-Trent-all-the-time on this story: I count 25 posts so far.

As I noted below, in the point about Al Gore, Byron York at NRO says Daschle is getting slammed by the Congressional Black Caucus for being soft on Trent Lott. How much worse can things get for Daschle when he gets the blame even when his opponents screw up? Meanwhile, NRO contributor Mark Levin says Bill Clinton is just as bad as Trent Lott.

In the immortal words of Mark Steyn, "if we members of the vast right-wing conspiracy don’t get back to our daily routine of obsessive Clinton-bashing, then the terrorists will have won."

Let's talk about Trent Lott, shall we? Robert George does a good takedown on Lott in today's National Review Online, as part of a larger pile-on of frustrated conservatives who (1) have been waiting years for the chance to dump Lott, (2) were genuinely horrified by the sentiments contained in Lott's comments and (3) are eager to distance themselves from any nostalgia for Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign and demonstrate that, unlike today's leading commentators on the Left, they are willing to denounce one of their own when he goes off the reservation.

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Shoeless Joe Jackson fan Strom Thurmond turns 100 today. For a little perspective, check out the A's roster the year Thurmond was first elected to public office. Note the presence of Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and Eddie Collins. Cobb, in fact, hit .323 that year.

I had to click on this because it seemed such an obvious cliche: Tonight on Donahue: "Angry White Men."

Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds confesses that he worked for Al Gore's 1988 presidential campaign.

It's worth revisiting the battle between Bill Moyers and The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, now that Moyers is taking out full-page ads to dispute a column on him written by Bill O'Reilly (the ads even take a gratuitous potshot at Hayes).

I missed this when it ran last week - Peggy Noonan tells Tom Daschle that he's not half the man she is.

Maureen Dowd can't help but admit that Bill Clinton's "preoccupation with the Monica threat to his future might have diluted his focus on the Qaeda threat to our future."

Larry Elder says that Dr. Phil has fallen into the usual array of statistical fallacies about "accidental" gun deaths of "children." The fact that an argument is so frequently buttressed by deceptive statistics makes you wonder.

The really telling thing about The Krug's column on supposed conservative bias in the media is what's missing:

1. Any specific examples of biased coverage. Give any conservative with half a brain and some free time a week - even a day - and he or she will come back with a list of examples of egregious liberal biases as long as your arm. Scroll down this site and see how many you find. Krugman couldn't cite one.

2. Any discussion of the political biases or motives generally held by network anchors, editors of major newspapers, etc. The Krug doesn't bother to claim that anybody much besides Brit Hume is likely to have ever voted Republican.

3. Biases about ideas. Even when the media is tough on Democrats, they often prefer liberal policies. Does The Krug dispute this?

4. The 800-pound donkey in the room: The Krug's own newspaper. I mean, would Slate run an article on the nefarious influence of corporate ownership on media without mentioning Microsoft? Yet, The Krug assumes that the little alternative daily he writes for has neither influence nor a point of view.

(Go here for more smack on The Krug's latest tantrum)

The New York Times recently picked up a story, reported earlier in local media, that William Jones, a Gray Davis appointee to the San Diego Regional Government Efficiency Commission, attended an inflammatory talk at which the speaker made anti-gay remarks and used a racial slur. No public comment yet from Davis on this growing scandal . . .

OK, I'm selectively leaving out some key details here, but hey, smearing reputations is all in good fun, no? The Wall Street Journal thinks the Times should know better.

(I first noted this story back in October)

Big, big day for New York Times bashing: Newsweek wakes up to the paper's conversion into an ideological crusade; Howard Bashman calls the Times on its uncritical reliance on an error-filled chart produced by the left-wing group the Alliance for Justice; Howard Kurtz takes the paper to task for refusing to run a letter to the editor on the Citibank-AT&T story; and Andrew Sullivan takes on a rather large error in an article designed to make David E. Kelley look like a critic within the Catholic Church. As the Newsweek piece points out, this is all great for business - the Times' sharper edge is helping boost circulation. But as with the Democratic party, that sharper edge may gradually wear away at the patina of respectability that used to make the Times a paper whose product appealed to the majority of Americans.

Way to launch a presidential campaign - the New Republic savages John Kerry, while David Frum calls him a 'Wahhabi Democrat.' Mickey Kaus is even running a contest to get to "the root of Kerry's loathsomeness." Personally, I saw the clip of Kerry telling Russert about the 1991 Iraq vote, and there was so much weaselling involved that he might as well have just said, "Tim, that's how I voted, but I didn't inhale."

Problem: he puts EVERYTHING in terms of Vietnam. Guess what, JFK minor? See that guy going into the voting booth who will be 40 years old in 2004? He wasn't paying attention to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution when it passed because he was too busy playing with his chew toys and learning to walk. He was nine years old when Nixon abolished the draft. He wasn't even a teenager when Saigon fell. The first news story he heard from Southeast Asia as an adult probably included the words "Pol Pot" and maybe "genocide." If he had a kid when he was 21, his kid's old enough to vote too, and the kid doesn't even remember "Platoon," let alone the real thing.

Speaking of Ricky West, he has a link to an article from Jeff Jacoby, noticing that the "new, spontaneous" Al Gore who's supposed to "let it rip" is not only a song we heard before, but even the same lyrics. As West puts it, "So, we've been mistaken: the new, new, new, new, new Al Gore is really the new, new Al Gore. Please update your registries accordingly."

Bob Novak has the DLC's response to the word from Democrats who want the party to step to the left . . .

This weblog, maintained by Ricky West, has a hilarious continuous counter counting down the days, minutes, etc. until Bill Clinton's suspension from the practice of law in Arkansas expires.

General Wesley Clark has been making presidential-candidate type noises. The National Review's John Miller is on the case, and thinks the Democrats should give serious thought to whether Clark should be on the vice presidential ticket in 2004. Meanwhile, check out this blog for the latest on Vermont Governor Howard Dean's uphill bid to recreate Jimmy Carter's 1976 outsider campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Bill Clinton's Oklahoma City opportunism notwithstanding, you can't blame a movement for the existence of a few crazies in its midst or spouting its dogmas. Still, this story of a leftist ideologue murdering a police officer in California to protest the power of corporations doesn't reflect well on the type.

Mickey Kaus likes Robert Reich's Nixonesque solution of expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and eliminating all other wealth transfer/income assistance programs. This is basically similar in design to the Jane Galt Tax Plan.

I had planned not to blog today, but some news is too big to wait: Mark Steyn now has his own website, marksteyn.com ("The One Man Global Content Provider"), with links to his commentary in outlets the world over. including his latest, on George W. Bush's Achilles heel: his refusal to recognize the Saudis as our sworn enemies. The sun truly never sets on Steyn's empire of warmongering good sense. (Thanks to Tim Blair for pointing this out).

Mr. Instantaneous points to a column by Neal Boortz suggesting that Daschle's and Gore's assaults on the media may be part of a long-run campaign to outlaw talk radio, perhaps through the campaign finance laws. I don't think the Democrats would go that far (I've been wrong on that score before), but they may be hoping to 'shame' the mainstream media outlets into tilting further to the left. Unfortunately for the Democrats, money talks, and the competitors of Fox News, for example, seem to have figured out that their target audience - people who are interested in news - includes an awful lot of people who think the media is too liberal and want to hear at least a semblance of objective reporting, respectful treatment of conservative ideas as such, and opinion commentary by conservative voices. Thus, NBC had Rush Limbaugh doing commentary on Election Night, which is probably one of the things that set so many Democrats off.

Maybe Alec Baldwin just needs to listen to this advice.

One sign of a party losing its discipline and focus is when moderates in critical elections get abandoned by activists over a single issue. A good party has to purge the occasional extreme apostate in a primary, but dumping Mary Landrieu will almost guarantee that the GOP holds the Senate for the next four years. Yet, the American Prowler reports that Emily's List is doing precisely that, over a single vote to ban partial-birth abortion. The Prowler even quotes Paul Begala ripping the group for its extremism.

Just don't hold your breath for the New York Times to bellow that divisions over abortion are splitting the Democratic party.

Al Gore is mad at right-wing dominance of the newsmedia, as an example of which he cites . . . Frank Rich! Glenn Reynolds notes that at least Gore is also willing to demonize postmodernism as well.

Andrew Sullivan notes that Joe Conason (or, actually, a reader he cites with approval and interestingly placed elipses) cites a bunch of examples of why voters are supposedly motivated solely by a preference for the nicer, friendlier guy in a presidential race. Significantly omitted from his list is Bill Clinton. Wassamatta Joe, couldn't bear to apply this particular chestnut to the Prophet WJC?

Leaving aside the usual Times spin, this poll has very, very bad news for Democrats, and is consistent with the conventional wisdom that the 2002 election was principally a battle between a popular and trusted president and an opposition party stuck badly in reverse. The two big findings are the rising number of people with an unfavorable impression of the Democratic Party generally, and the horrific numbers for Al Gore: a 19% favorable rating vs. 43% unfavorable. Those are Gingrich-like numbers, or worse, and suggest that Gore would have an enormous task ahead of him just trying to hold onto the votes he got two years ago. If Gore's own polls show similar results, he will really have to be consumed by his own obsessions to run again. Is he really that far gone?

Alec Baldwin is seeing an "anger management therapist" in London. I guess Henry Hyde can sleep easier now. Maybe there'll be a 12-step program where he has to go on TV and annouce that he's over the Florida recount . . .

Kentucky Congressman Ken Lucas is mulling a switch to the Republican Party.

GOP Senate candidate Suzie Terrell says Mary Landrieu "threatened me" by saying, after a debate, "This is your last campaign." There's always been a higher standard for candidates running against women, and apparently it even applies to how a woman Senator speaks to a female challenger. Then again, as Glenn Reynolds points out, this sort of thing is fair game for Republicans under Daschle's Rules of Debate.

Jonathan Rauch wants to cut my taxes.

This piece on the EU's rejoicing over the collapse of Austria's government just drips with establishment EU thinking: "The great era of right-wing populism appears to be over," said Gernot Erler, deputy whip of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats. Haider's government did indeed appear to be a bunch of nuts, but the sentiment clearly extends to anyone who would oppose the undemocratic establishment in Brussels.

George Will with early thoughts on the 2004 Senate races; Bob Novak with news that John Thune may not be the candidate in line to challenge Tom Daschle (or seek Daschle's seat if he steps down); the Washington Post with news that Thune might wind up in the Cabinet, plus more "Cabinet chess."

Nothing provides a mirror image of government power better than lobbyists, who are hired principally for the likelihood that they will persuade powerful people to do things. That's what makes it such a sign of the times that the ACLU has hired Georgia's departing bomb-throwing Republican Congressman Bob Barr. Barr, you remember, called for Bill Clinton's impeachment even before anyone had heard of Monica Lewinsky; he was for years an icon of the Far Right, such as it is within the Beltway. But he's also an outspoken libertarian who has made privacy issues (real privacy issues, not privacy-as-a-code-word-for-abortion) his signature in Congress, which is apparently what he will focus on for the ACLU. The message here is that the ACLU understands that sending these types of people to Capitol Hill these days will get them nowhere.

If Tom Daschle is looking for examples of vicious, unfair, and overwrought and overly emotional personal attacks on politicians, he should look here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here (last line). And here. And here.

But hey, that's just a few weeks' work . . .

With rumors in the air that Jim Jeffords might want to be a Republican again, Dr. Weevil has a devious plan to double-cross and humiliate Jeffords, with the added bonus that the GOP could do so in precisely the way he stuck it to Republicans, rather than by means of some form of revenge that would wind up looking petty by sticking it to the people of Vermont (leave aside the Northeast Dairy Compact, which is corrupt special-interest legislation and deserves its doom even more than Jeffords does). I don't think Trent Lott is nearly this mean or petty, but it's an amusing suggestion.

Remember stories like this next time you hear the Western world blamed for pollution.

So, Gore is back. The 'new' Al Gore, again. Let's review where we've been:

When the 2000 election ended with Gore losing by a few hundred votes in Florida, he didn't have to demand a manual recount. If he'd conceded with dignity after the (statutorily required) machine recount, he could have placed himself above the fray while his surrogates blasted the voting 'irregularities' and demanded a Senate investigation. Instead of disappearing for most of 2001, he could simply have vanished in mid-November 2000, and re-emerged in February 2001, having allowed a decent interval for Bush to assemble his team. Gore's dignified refusal to drag the nation through a recount would have given him standing, as the wounded party in the election and the man who got the most votes, to announce that he was going to consider himself the leader of the loyal opposition, declare himself immediately to be a candidate in 2004, and make regular public speeches criticizing Bush and explaining his own agenda.

He didn't. He spent much of his credibility and his remaining good will with the American people in the recount, including his stubborn insistence on a recount strategy that was selective and inconsistent, proclaiming the need to "count every vote" while asking only for recounts in the most Democratic parts of the state and where they would be conducted by Democratic local officials, while aggressively challenging the counting of absentee ballots by members of the Armed Forces. Then, having committed himself to a full-fledged assault on the legitimacy of the Bush presidency, Gore went into hiding for many months, leaving the Democrats leaderless. Partly this was necessary to heal the wounds his recount strategy had inflicted. But it was also, by his own admission, because Gore needed to get away after the crushing end to his presidential hopes.

In short, both Gore's recount strategy and his subsequent withdrawal from public life were poor strategic decisions driven by Gore's tendency to let his emotional needs and his overweening personal ambition get the better of his judgment under pressure. Ditto for his unqualified sycophancy to Clinton during the impeachment crisis; ditto for his decision to take the agressive posture pushed by his daughter that there was "no controlling legal authority" in his violation of an unambiguous century-old federal statute; ditto for his inability to control his audible sighs during the first debate, which he now admits was a mistake but says was the result of his exasperation with Bush. For all the portrayals of Gore as a robot without a pulse, the real Al is a guy whose decisionmaking ability and judgment under pressure is apt to be overcome and compromised by his emotions.

In times of a complex and frustrating war against a shadowy enemy, when we need to constantly demonstrate both unbreaking resolve and thoughtful restraint; when we must place tremendous pressure on our allies while making a show of our respect for their independence (you don't sigh and roll your eyes when dealing with evasive French bureaucrats); when the American people need reassurance that the president's bearings are unshakeable; when we can easily find ourselves dealing all at once with an elusive renegade in bin Laden, a potential revolution in Iran, and a nuclear-armed lunaticocracy in North Korea while trying to hold together the coalition for war with Iraq; is that the kind of man we want at the helm?

Sometimes it's the little things that are telling:

"Everyone is sick of the election rehash, and sicker still of the Wellstone memorial story, but: one detail needs relating. Got it first hand the other day from someone who attended. As they were waiting for the event to begin, they noticed a big beach ball bouncing around the crowd, traveling up the stands and down, back, forth. A beach ball.

Who brings a beach ball to a memorial for a dead man? Can you imagine standing in the garage, keys in hand, patting your pockets for wallet and sunglasses, thinking have I forgotten anything for this somber event? Oh, right! An inflatable sphere the crowd can bat around for fun. It's not a memorial service without one.

I'm surprised no one dove from the stage after their eulogy, and surfed the crowd to the concession stand."

If you want a perfect picture of where the Left is today, look at Phil Donahue. Donahue's the same Donahue he was as a media and ratings darling in the 70s and early 80s. His opinions haven't changed, his hectoring style hasn't changed, even his hair hasn't changed. The difference is, his act has worn out, nobody's watching anymore, and the plug is about to be pulled. Yes, it's true that the evening time slot wasn't friendly to Phil, whose core late-morning audience was stay-at-home moms who wished they worked outside the home (hint: twenty years later, they do). But Donahue was supposed to compete with two-fisted Bill O'Reilly as the Next Great Left-Wing Talk Show Hope. Instead, his philosophical rigidity, condescension and old-Left ideas couldn't compete with O'Reilly's populism. The Right today has the Left surrounded on four sides: new ideas, intellectual honesty, optimism, and the ability to identify with normal human beings. All that's left to sell is didactic, inflexible academic theory and bile. That may sell in book form (see Moore, Michael), but who wants to sit down to an hour of it every night, or listen to three hours on the radio in the afternoon?

And we thought there were voter fraud problems in South Dakota . . .

If you missed it, this anecdote from a Bulgarian blogger, quoted on Instapundit, is a beautiful example of culture clash between blinkered American leftists and the real world. As our friend Larry observed, "sounds like a Baldwin."

Instapundit had the link to this devastating critique of Democratic apathy about military and defense policy, from Washington Monthly:

"[T]here's been plenty of hand-wringing among the leadership and rank-and-file Democrats about how politically inept the party appeared in the face of Bush's saber rattling. But that's the problem. Democrats are in this position precisely because we respond to matters of war politically, tactically. We worry about how to position ourselves so as not to look weak, rather than thinking through realistic, sensible Democratic principles on how and when to employ military force, and arguing particular cases, such as Iraq, from those principles."

Among the problems: Democrats don't have think tanks and opinion magazines devoted to serious thought on these issues (although the omission of the New Republic from the list is curious). Telling detail:

"When it comes to military service, Democratic lawmakers have nothing to be embarrassed about; of the Senate's 38 veterans, 17 are Democrats (including Daschle). Still, one indication that Democratic lawmakers spend relatively less time focused on military affairs is the people they hire: Two-thirds of veterans on the Senate Armed Services Committee staff are Republicans."

I'm less convinced than the author about whether there is or can be a military policy that Democrats can line up behind (remember the "peace dividend"?), but at least she's trying.

The comparison to Republican approaches to race and inner-city issues is a bit off, I think - a better comparison would be health care or the environment, both of which are complex issues that many Republicans (myself included) have tended to treat as an annoyance or worse. The GOP has grown much savvier on health care over the last 5 or 6 years, and Republicans from Western states often bring a zeal to land-use issues that carries with it a comprehensive outlook on the environment. But the enthusiasm gap is still there. (Incidentally, that's one reason I think the GOP will benefit so greatly from enacting a prescription drug plan for Medicare, along its own reformist model, with little help from the Democrats - it will establish credibility and start to burrow the conservative imprint into the functioning of government on healthcare policy).

Somebody at Townhall.com should declare a Pelosi-free zone for a few weeks. Just look at all the Pelosi columns. All the best ammunition's being spent in the first few rounds. Save some for later, folks.

Peggy Noonan notes that famously tolerant liberals unveil their puritanical streak when it comes to smokers:

I think it is an insufficiently commented-upon irony that cigarette prohibition and the public shaming it entails is the work of modern liberals. They're supposed to be the ones who are nonjudgmental, who live and let live, but they approach smoking like Carry Nation with her ax. Conservatives on the other hand let you smoke. They acknowledge sin and accept imperfection. Also most of them are culturally inclined toward courtesy of the old-fashioned sort.

I hate, hate, hate smoking, and I think the cigarette companies brought a lot of their troubles on themselves over the years by their legal tactics and lies. But I tend to side with the pro-smoking forces on fights like the one Noonan cites, where Mayor Bloomberg is trying to drive smoking out of bars.

If Clinton had smoked that cigar, he would have been in more trouble . . .

Chris Suellentrop at Slate starts off defending Nancy Pelosi against charges that she's too liberal, but winds up with faint praise more damning than anything her critics on the Right have written: "While it's true that Pelosi's views, particularly on war and foreign policy, are out of step with much of the American public's, they're right in the mainstream of what House Democrats believe."

Suellentrop's comparison to Tom DeLay is a fair one, but the GOP has the president too; what Pelosi does as well is get the GOP off the hook for DeLay's unapologetic conservatism.

Meanwhile, Harold Ford intends to go down fighting.

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Ramesh Ponnuru over at NRO is drooling over the team of conservatives in the new Senate leadership (other than Trent Lott, of course). Says one source: there's no need to worry: "We've got Trent surrounded." One of the more radical changes is Don Nickels replacing Pete Domenici at the Budget Committee. Ponnuru also lists possible challengers to Barbara Boxer; one is Congressman Darrell Issa. God help us. Issa is one of the handful of Republicans who is reflexively pro-Arab.

Tired of conservative columnists pouring hot pitchers of boiling scorn down on the Democrats? Then you won't, I suppose, want to read George Will's latest column, which is scathing:

After Britain's Labour Party was demolished by Margaret Thatcher in the 1983 general election, an undaunted Labourite vowed, ``No compromise with the electorate." That can be the rallying cry of Pelosi Democrats.

More inside-the-Beltway stuff in Bob Novak's column on the impending doom of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, which will leave the Bush Administration looking to fill the Treasury and SEC jobs as well as Larry Lindsey's economic-adviser job all at once.

While there are several candidates, all have their shortcomings:

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Forced to choose between taking the high road in the footsteps of John Ashcroft or . . . well, following the footsteps of Al Gore, John Thune picks the high road. That leaves us, for the session starting in January, with 51 Republicans, 47 Democrats, 1 Louisiana election, and a partridge in a pear tree (I-Vt).

Line of succession, if anything happens to George W. Bush, now runs Dick Cheney-Denny Hastert-Ted Stevens.

November 5 - Republicans take the Senate.

November 6 - Jiddah. November 10 - Riyadh November 13 - London.

Could it be - is Maureen Dowd taking the bold step that Alec Baldwin only dreamed of, and leaving the country for the duration of GOP dominance?

I noted in my 2004 Senate breakdown last week that one of the toughest Senate seats for the Democrats to defend will be Fritz Hollings in South Carolina - Roll Call, the Congressional newspaper, now reports that Hollings may retire and there's no likely successor. (Link via Drudge)

The New York Sun has a review of the Gores' new book, but frankly even a review of the thing seemed too boring to read.

Did the SEC fire an employee for leaking sensitive information to China? Bill Gertz of the Washington Times has the story. (Link via Drudge).

Connie Chung's interview with New Mexico's Democratic Governor-elect Bill Richardson the day after the election rankled me. Here's the part that did it:

CHUNG: Ambassador Richardson, outgoing Majority Leader Tom Daschle said that the reason why the Republicans did so well was in part because the Democrats' message on the economy did not get out.

Do you really believe that the Democrats had an economic plan? And I know you're going to say that Daschle presented it on the floor of the Senate, but I don't know that anybody really got that message.

RICHARDSON: Well, Connie, I think two reasons were responsible for Democrats not doing well.

One was President Bush's frenetic campaigning. He was good at it. And he made a difference. He went to one county in New Mexico. Although I won in a landslide, the one county he went to, I didn't do well.

The second reason is, I think the majority leader is doing a good job, but I don't think the Democrats had an economic message. I was able, here in New Mexico, just at the local level, to talk about economic growth, competitive tax reform, even tax cuts to make our state more competitive. People care about bread-and-butter issues, putting more money in their pockets, economic growth, entrepreneurship. And I just don't see nationally the Democrats talking about that.

CHUNG: Yes. I know. But don't you think, in this election, basically the people were concerned about terrorism? They were concerned about having the country support the president if he invades Iraq. Those were the concerns. The economy, of course, was important, but, apparently, they weren't voting that way.

The transcript doesn't quite capture her indignation that a Democrat, a Clinton Democrat, was daring to disagree with her analysis that any Republican victory had to be only about terrorism, and couldn't possibly be even partly based on people preferring Republican solutions on economic growth issues. But Connie Chung wasn't going to be denied; she moved on to a more congenial subject, Robert Reich, who was all too happy to argue that nobody could have voted Republican based on economic issues because "the Democrats have a very strong record on the economy. . . Look at what happened. In the Clinton administration, you had a great economy. In the Bush administration, you have a lousy economy." So, she asked him, "Robert Reich, tell us, what do you think? Is 2004 going to be a tough one for the Democrats, because we can't see the light right now today?" And, "But what happened? I mean, do we blame Daschle? Do we blame Gephardt? Was it the leadership?"

Whaddya mean, we?

How low has the Democratic Party's leadership sunk in the eyes of the party faithful? Well, a great many Democrats believe that Bush is an imbecile. They also believe that Bush outwitted their party's leaders. You do the math. I wouldn't be printing up those "Put Dick In The Oval Office" Buttons just yet.

Also, Jane Galt on the Democrats' response to the elections, on Wednesday:

Walk me through the logic here: you just got routed in an election in which voters specifically expressed a desire to hand control of the Senate over to the other party. The main factor in your defeat seems to have been the opposing party's overwhelmingly popular president. So the problem, say Democratic pundits, is that the party didn't "stand up to the president", and need to either

a) Move to the left
b) Go negative on the president

I'm afraid I'm not following the logical leap from

1) The voters dissed us because they like the President

to

2) We must therefore vigorously oppose the President by any means necessary.

Can someone fill me in?

Stuart Buck, linking to the same piece, on Thursday: Democratic pundits are arguing that "Democrats lost because President Bush is so popular, and therefore Democrats would have done better if they had more staunchly opposed him"

The Wall Street Journal, this morning (link for subscribers only): "Let's see: Republicans won because their voters were fired up to defend Mr. Bush's policies. So Democrats should have been even more vociferous in assailing those policies. No doubt Americans everywhere would have embraced a party that positioned itself as soft on the war on terror. (Look how it helped Max Cleland in Georgia!) And if that didn't do it, then surely they would have flooded to the polls to endorse . . . a tax increase."

Great minds think alike?

Let's pick up where we left off yesterday, with the early prognosis for the 2004 Senate races. Once again, you can check the 1998 results for these seats here. This will probably about conclude this week's bout of election-related blogorrhea.

THE REPUBLICANS:

1. RETIREMENTS: Just one, a prominent one in a state that could go either way (I haven't checked lately, but last I heard the governors' race was still unsettled): John McCain in Arizona. You have to count that as a possible Democratic pickup.

2. THE NEWCOMER: Frank Murkowski in Alaska is supposed to be up for re-election, but he was just elected governor, and his appointed replacement will stand for re-election in 2004. That's a guarantee that there will at least be a contested election, but Alaska has been GOP territory for some time, and the ANWR controversy has exacerbated that. The main risk may well be that if Murkowski is a disaster as the governor, voters might take it out on his hand-picked replacement.

3. SAFE SEATS IN SAFE STATES: Republicans have a bunch of these, guys who are well set in their seats and won handily last time - Don Nickles in Oklahoma, Richard Shelby in Alabama, Judd Gregg in New Hampshire, Mike Crapo in Idaho, Sam Brownback in Kansas, Robert Bennett in Utah. I may also put Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado along with fellow former Democrat Shelby in this category.

4. SWING STATES: Republicans Charles Grassley in Iowa, Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and George Voinovich in Ohio seem safe - Specter faced a still challenge after the Clarence Thomas hearings, but he's tacked far enough to the left that it's tough for Democrats to outflank him now - but all three are in states that will be heated battlegrounds for the presidential race, and any one of them could find himself facing a formidable opponent. Iowa, for example, has a popular Democratic governor, Tom Vilsack, who won re-election handily Tuesday and, with Tom Harkin in the other Senate seat, has nowhere else to go but challenge Grassley or run for the White House (although Vilsack is also sometimes mentioned as vice presidential material, the Democrats' trend in the last few elections has been to look for veep candidates who will generate some national buzz). Put Campbell in this category - Colorado has been a swing state in recent presidential years, although it went GOP in a big way on Tuesday - if not in the one above.

5. ENDANGERED SPECIES: Three GOP incumbents won with less than 53% in 1998. One, Kit Bond of Missouri, is in a swing state, but I suspect he will do fine even if he's facing Dick Gephardt. Righty Jim Bunning of Kentucky will probably be helped hugely by the presidential race - Bunning barely won re-election with 49.75% of the vote last time, but Kentucky's a pretty conservative state these days nationally.

That leaves us the most endangered Republican of all, Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois, who slid into office on the trail of slime left by outgoing Senator Carol Mosely Braun. With Illinois' Democratic governor and Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel both newly elected, I can't immediately think who will be the favorite to take on Fitzgerald (the way things are going these days, I'd have to guess Paul Simon). But the Democrats will push very hard for this seat and have to be favored to reclaim it.

THE PROGNOSIS: I'd rate the Democrats as having two good shots at pickups here - Illinois and Arizona - with maybe about three other races winding up contested. With the Democrats themselves defending about three or four hot races, they will need a great string of luck to pick up two seats and go to 51 - and that's assuming they hang on to Louisiana and South Dakota this month. In other words, if the GOP can squeeze out one more seat in the Louisiana race or from South Dakota in the event of a recount, the odds will get prohibitively high against Democrats recapturing the Senate before 2006.

A judge in Kansas beats his wife - with the voters' approval.

It's not too soon for political junkies to start looking ahead to the 2004 Senate elections. There's a reason why: strategy for those elections, as well as the presidential election, will do much to drive the parties' calculations of how long the Republican window of likely White House-Senate control is (the landscape of House elections doesn't change much from year to year; one House election raises concerns in both parties pretty much the same as any other). Let's take a look. The Democrats, who will likely enter the elections needing to gain between 2 and 4 seats to regain control (you can't predict deaths or resignations or party switches, but we'll have a better idea after Louisiana and South Dakota are settled), but they will face an uphill battle: defending 19 seats to the GOP's 15. (You can go to the FEC's website for the results of the 1998 Senate elections for these same 34 seats.) I'm also figuring that there's a better than even chance that a popular Bush is facing either Gore again or someone like John Kerry, running on a basically populist, anti-war and generally left-leaning campaign after the fashion of Gore's post-convention strategy; obviously, if Bush falters badly, the whole calculus changes.

DEMOCRATIC SEATS

1. RETIREMENTS: The only one I know of so far is Zell Miller in Georgia, which in a presidential election year could be a GOP pickup. Miller's replacement on the Democratic ticket is likely to be more liberal than he, although the best bet is moderate Roy Barnes, who just lost his bid for re-election as governor. Daniel Inouye in Hawaii and Fritz Hollings in South Carolina also seem like potential retirees given their age and seniority. It's also possible that Tom Daschle in South Dakota or John Edwards in North Carolina could step down if one of them wins the presidential nomination; in this climate, I doubt anybody would quit a race just to be a vice presidential candidate.

2. SAFE SEATS IN SAFE STATES: I'd tentatively list as safe bets Chris Dodd in Connecticut (unless John Rowland, just re-elected as governor, runs); Inouye (probably a safe seat even if Inouye, who's held the seat since Hawaii got statehood, dies or retires); Barbara Mikulski in Maryland; Patrick Leahy in Vermont; Daschle (his popularity may be taking a hit at the moment, but SD voters seem unlikely to dump him entirely unless the presidential race is such a gigantic blowout that it massively skews turnout); Chuck Schumer in NY (unless Giuliani runs against him). Barbara Boxer is also fairly safe unless the Republicans can really drive a wedge between her and California's left-leaning electorate on the war, but high turnout for the presidential race is likely to help Boxer.

3. THE GREEN STATES: Three Democratic Senators are running in states where strong Green Party showings made the Bush-Gore race extremely close last time; these seem like fairly safe seats but they could become contested races if the GOP finds a strong, moderate-sounding candidate on the Norm Coleman model: Russ Feingold of Wisconsin (who I would think of as the safest of the three, although he actually won narrowly last time while the others cruised); Patty Murray in Washington; and Ron Wyden in Oregon. Given that the 2000 Senate race in Washington was so close and the GOP's Gordon Smith just cruised to victory in Oregon on Tuesday, you have to figure the Republicans will target at least one of these races with a real challenger.

4. THE SOUTH: Here's where the President's popularity will be key, as it was this year. Defending a Democratic Senate seat in the South while a popular Republican president is heading the ticket. The Democrats will be defending five seats: Edwards, Hollings, Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas, John Breaux in Louisiana, and Bob Graham in Florida. Hollings is the most endangered; he and Edwards are the only two who got less than 55% of the vote in 1998, and Edwards was running against an incumbent. Breaux, a noted moderate, seems the safest, although Graham has been fairly solid on the war, which will be particularly necessary if that's the lead issue in the presidential campaign.

5. THE REST: That leaves three swing seats. One is held by a popular senator, Evan Bayh, in conservative Indiana. He doesn't look like much to worry about for the Democrats. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota also cruised last time. The third is Harry Reid in Nevada; in 1998, Reid won by less than 500 votes, and in 2000, Bush won the state by a razor-thin margin. This is likely to be a nail-biter, although as usual the issue of the nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain will figure prominently.

THE PROGNOSIS: The Democrats will fight many and expensive battles in 2004, but only a handful really look scary right now if you're a Democrat - Reid, Hollings, Miller and maybe some of the other southerners. Still, having at least three seriously endangered seats makes the job of assembling a net gain of 2 or more seats a daunting one.

(I'll take on the 15 GOP seats later.)

An entertaining piece on the Democrats' formation of a circular firing squad after Teusday night's debacle; among other things, Washington Post reporter Kevin Merida uses the occasion as an excuse to interview Red Auerbach (“You show me a guy who loses an election and he’s happy, he’s an idiot. If you lose, you have to go out and say, ‘I’m the unhappiest person in the world.’ When you lose, I want you to be unhappy, I want you to be miserable.”) Great quote, only partially tongue in cheek, from James Carville, who proves to be a much more graceful in defeat than in victory: “I kind of enjoy the second-guessing and recriminations and finger-pointing . . . I enjoy observing the pettiness that defeat brings out in people."

What I also find very entertaining is the large number of Democratic pooh-bahs coming out of the woodwork to argue that the Democrats' two biggest problems were:

1. Failure to politicize the war. (How quickly we forget that being the big no-no way back in the old days of September 2002)

2. Failure to take a firm position in favor of raising taxes.

They can compare Bush to something out of Orwell all day long, but look who's trying to run like it's 1984 . . .

Look, this is like arguing that the best way to beat the Lakers is to turn the game into a one-on-one battle in the paint. It's insane, it's exactly the game (we) Republicans want. To win, the Democrats needed the election to be about something other than taxes and the war. They needed it to be about healthcare, corporate corruption, and a million little small-bore how-can-we-give-the-voters-some-of-other-people's-money issues.

The other funny thing is the fact that Democrats are now all claiming to be in favor of "investors." Of course, the Democratic message has always been that anybody with money to invest is "the rich" who want to rip off "working families." In the 80s, for example, Democrats loved to trash "corporate raiders," who were basically pro-investor in battles against labor and management, and guys like Michael Moore thought all the world's problems were caused by shareholder-wealth-maximizing corporations. Hint: unless you are talking about corporate disclosures (which is a hot issue these days), being opposed to corporations making money is, ipso facto, being opposed to their investors seeing their retirement accounts prosper.

My own suspicion is that the Democratic leadership should do the following on taxes and the war -

1. Support the war with Iraq. It's the right thing to do, and they haven't a prayer of winning the White House as an echo chamber for the nation's critics. And argue for a big UN role in nation-building after the war.

2. Argue for more defense spending, and that more tax revenue is needed for a bigger military. Guess what? You can rip Republicans for selling out the nation's defenses for tax cuts. And military contracts and bases are big-time pork, and will provide lots of good-paying jobs for skilled blue-collar workers. Invoke FDR and the "Arsenal of Democracy."

3. Propose broader tax reform - including tax simplification and loophole-closing - and try to smuggle in higher rates on the dreaded "top 1%" or whatever as part of an overall package. This was how bipartisan support was built for the 1986 tax reform bill that lowered income tax rates and raised the capital gains tax.

4. Propose indexing capital gains, or exempting individuals over age 60 or 65, as an alternative to GOP plans to cut the tax. Argue that the Democratic plan is more "targeted" at seniors.

Yes, these moves would involve moving to the Right, but like Republican plans about prescription drugs, they would give Democrats the opportunity to join the debate, appear moderate, and shape the solutions in a way that warms their big-government, tax-the-rich hearts.

The good news? They'll never do it.

Mandate fresh in hand, President Bush unveils his new legislative agenda.

Click here to check up on the campaign of Suzie Terrell, the GOP candidate to unseat Mary Landrieu as U.S. Senator from Louisiana.

I wonder: would Max Cleland have done better if Cynthia McKinney and Bob Barr were still on the ballot in their congressional districts? McKinney's constituents nut-case supporters probably stayed home because they were mad that "outside influences" (as her father put it, "J-E-W-S") had done in their gal in the primary. Barr, meanwhile, was always a bigger magnet for the Left than a beloved figure on the Right. Since turnout was such a huge factor in the Georgia races, you have to ask.

So, last I heard, the new Senate will be 51 Republicans (48 returning Senators or retained seats plus Jim Talent, Norm Coleman and Saxby Chambliss, with the loss of only Tim Hutchinson's seat), 46 Democrats (45 returning Senators or retained seats plus Mark Pryor, with the loss of seats held by Jean Carnahan, Paul Wellstone, and Max Cleland), and Jim Jeffords, with the South Dakota race still unsettled and Mary Landrieu still running to lock up her seat. In other words, if Tim Johnson hangs onto his slim lead in any recount, the GOP will still be just the loss of one vote away from needing Dick Cheney to break deadlocks. Hopefully, Lincoln Chafee will stay put, and maybe the GOP will even take one of the two remaining seats somehow. If there's one lesson we learned from Florida in 2000 and the long string of bizarre ocurrences the past two years with the Senate, it's that it really isn't healthy - psychologically or procedurally - to have the presidency or a house of Congress hanging by such a slim thread between two evenly divided parties. Frequent turnover can be healthy, yes; but too much 50/50 drives politicians and their supporters to a state of overanxiety, paranoia and animosity that's deeply counterproductive. Let's hope that nothing else happens to throw the GOP's control into question between now and November 2004. Then, after two years of real responsibility, the party can be judged on what it hath wrought, and the Democrats can be judged on the alternative vision the party has laid out to the People. In the meantime, there will still be plenty of bickering to do, but maybe we can all save the long knives for the enemies who really deserve them.

Byron York at NRO has the full story on why the Democrats' obsession with Florida 2000 led them down a blind alley. But there's a flip side to the likely demise of Terry McAuliffe: for all the bitterness, all the demagoguery and all the sleaze -- in fact, as a direct result of the bitterness, the demagoguery and the sleaze -- McAuliffe has been an incredible raiser of money. The Republicans always have a structural advantage in fundraising because they don't have to sell out their principles to particular special interests - Republican views of the general national interest are often quite congenial to big donors. Democrats, on the other hand, are always walking a tightrope between hating the rich (definition: everyone who makes over $50,000 a year) and needing their financial support. Without McAuliffe at the helm, that job will get harder.

PS: another NRO piece suggests that Hillary might be the bigger winner than Gore. I think this may be true, although Hillary appears to be wisely sitting out 2004, plotting for the more opportune moment. And she voted for war with Iraq.

Al Gore, with Barbara Walters, on what the 2002 elections mean:

I think it means that the Democrats have to be the loyal opposition in fact and not just in name. . . . Democrats should not mistake the magnitude of this loss, there has to be a major regrouping. . . . I mean taking a hard look at how we can talk about the real life concerns that families in this country are wrestling with every day and present a very forceful alternative, supporting the president when the president is right, but offering a constructive alternative and presenting it boldly when we think we have a better approach.

Well, Gore certainly seems to agree with pundits who think that the leadership void in the Democratic Party right now is an opportunity that's knocking on his door [Ed. - a void is knocking? Hello, mixed metaphor alert?][Hey, it's Al Gore's house, where else would voids hang out?] The real challenge will be the latter part - "offering a constructive alternative." Will the "New Al Gore" be able to articulate one? The "I have a secret plan to fix the economy" approach isn't selling too well these days.

We'll be doing politics and more politics today - back to baseball in a day or so. Some thoughts on the big Election Night:

1. My predictions below weren't terrible, but I missed a bunch of races.

2. How far has the modern conservative movement come when Rush Limbaugh can sit next to Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert on NBC on Election Night? Of course, Russert loves a good argument, which is why he hits it off so well with Limbaugh (if you've ever seen Russert interview him). Several of the more incendiary commentators were actually somewhat restrained last night - Election Night can be humbling - including Rush, Carville (I wish I'd videotaped Carville with his head in the garbage pail) and Begala. The main exception was Pat Caddell, who was breathing fire over on MSNBC (by the way, we lost the TV remote, so last night was an agony of standing next to the TV flipping from Channel 2 to 4 to 10 to 43 to 46).

3. The Republicans basically won all the close ones, and won every way they could. Republicans won with incuumbents (Allard), with challengers (Chambliss, Talent), they won open seats (Sununu, Dole, Graham), they won blue states (Ehrlich, Coleman, Romney, Pataki), red states (Chambliss leading the Georgia sweep, Perry and Cornyn leading the Texas sweep), they won with conservatives (Bush, Allard, Chambliss, Ehrlich, Talent), moderates (Dole, Coleman, Romney) and liberals (Pataki), they won with fresh faces (Chambliss, Ehrlich), with veterans of the Clinton years (Graham), with family ties (Bush, Dole, Sununu) with former failed presidential candidates (Dole, Alexander) and former failed statewide candidates (Talent, Coleman, Romney), with executives seeking the legislature (Janklow, Coleman) and legislators seeking the executive job (Ehrlich). Where they lost, there were good and obvious reasons: Bill Simon ran an awful campaign, Tim Hutchinson was (justly) done in by a sex scandal, the Illinois and Michigan governors' mansions had been Republican too long and governors in places like Tennessee screwed the party by raising taxes, Doug Forrester was squashed by a deus ex machina intervention. The only one the party can really kick itself about is Simon, who ran well enough even in the face of an overwhelming onslaught -- Gray Davis still managed just 48% of the vote in the last tally I saw -- that a decent campaign could have unseated him.

4. The Green Party was not a factor - nearly all the victorious GOP incumbents polled 50% or better.

5. One pundit (I lost track of who said what) suggested that Bill Frist may have burnished his credentials as a 2004 VP candidate if Cheney retires, by engineering the Senate campaign. I doubt it, because the loss of the Tennessee statehouse means Frist would be replaced in the still-tenuous Senate by a Democrat.

6. Defending all these Senate seats in 2008 will be a beast, but that's then and this is now. I also think the GOP will lose the House in 2004, but then you never know.

7. The Democrats ran to the center this time, which now looks like a mistake (all the Democratic moderates got crushed), and they may compound the error by reacting and running to the Left in 2004. Repeat after me: run to your base in the off years, run to the middle in Presidential years. Bill Kristol (I think it was) probably had it right: Al Gore will be the big Democratic winner here because he'll argue that the Democrats need to have a clear voice of full-throated opposition to Bush. The problem is, Gore still doesn't have a program of his own, just bitterness, and as either NR or the Weekly Standard (I forget) was pointing out recently, all the candidates Gore stumped for got killed.

8. Everyone was asking, what turned things to the GOP in the closing days? The common wisdom is, people decided to unite behind Bush in wartime, especially in the South. I have two theories. Number one, Larry Kudlow was right: the reappearance of Fritz Mondale reminded many voters why they started voting for Republicans in the first place. Number two is the point made often lately and best by Jonathan Last: forget Democratic ire over Florida, it was the Republican base that was fired through the roof by a series of dirty tricks, classless stunts and threatened lawsuits that reminded everyone of the worst excesses of Clinton years and of the raw ambition of Gore's ham-handed, sore-headed Florida recount strategy. With the exception of California and New Jersey, the voters essentially sent the message Republicans got after Watergate: that the party needs to finally let go of its clinging-by-fingernails to every last bit of power it could clutch, and go off somewhere and reflect a little on what public service is supposed to be about. For the GOP, that was a critical factor in the transformation of the party into one that valued ideas above compromises, and the Republicans have benefitted from the resulting blossoming of the party's intellectual and spiritual base ever since.

Unsurprisingly, the limited anecdotal evidence marshalled by the Washington Post (the Post talked to a "Saudi political analyst," who I assume must have a day job) suggests the election is being interpreted by overseas observers solely as a referendum on Iraq. With distance, they may be seeing more clearly than we do. If I were Colin Powell, I'd call up the French foreign minister today and politely point out that President Bush will be huddling with legislators to hammer out the agenda for the next 4 or 5 days, and that once he's done with that, the train will be leaving the station for Baghdad, with or without France and the UN Security Council.

I hadn't realized at first that the GOP candidates in Louisiana really did out-poll Landrieu. The big strategic question of the day: if Bush and Rove are such genuises for risking the president's popularity in all these local races, will they double down and send George W. to the bayou? (Or will he want to be seen back in DC signing bills and running the war?) And what other national figures from the two parties will weigh in? Six years of Senate consequences could ride on the answer.

The busiest lobbiest in Washington over the next few months? It may be Jim Douglas, the new Republican governor of Vermont. You know, Vermont, who voted overwhelmingly for Al Gore in 2000 (and, if I remember right, for John McCain in the Republican primaries); whose lone Congressman is a socialist; who has one Senator who tied up and slimed Bush's judicial nominees as Judiciary Committee chairman, and another who gave the Democrats the Senate by switching parties; and whose outgoing Democratic governor wants to run for President in 2004. Douglas is going to have to do some real groveling to get Vermont's interests heard by anybody in the new Republican Washington.

The McCain-Feingold bill, which goes into effect today, imposes yet more restrictions on the arduous fundraising burden of challengers -- just in time for an election cycle where the GOP is holding the advantage of incumbency in the White House and both houses of Congress. Yes, purge us of the evil influence of money, please!

I'm eagerly awaiting the imminent appointment of Vermont Senators Jim Jeffords and Patrick Leahy to the Senate Select Committee on Dishes Best Served Cold.

Slipping his resignation letter over the transom on a busy news day: people I work with know and respect Harvey Pitt, and everyone seems to agree that he deserved better than this.

This is implied below, but I'm also predicting Senate victories for Lamar! in Tennessee and Harkin in Iowa. I'm not so sure the GOP will take the Senate, just feeling my way race by race. Kaus is picking a good deal more chaos than I am, with defeats for incumbents Hutchinson, Allard, Cleland and Carnahan (I'm with him on the last one).

One thing that will be interesting in the results is how successful the GOP was in turning this into an election about taxes (well, except that the endangered Democrat incumbents mostly voted for Bush on the tax cut). I would never have predicted that taxes would be such a big issue, but if it was, the Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for blocking votes on everything else; the votes everyone remembers from this Congress are the tax cut and the war, not shining moments for Democratic focus groups.

The GOP has, however, lost ground on taxes in one Senate race: New Jersey. Bob Torricelli was generally fairly favorable to at least some tax cuts, particularly capital gains. Lautenberg, assuming he wins, won't be. Also, on social and foreign policy issues, it's obviously a big loss to see Elizabeth Dole replace Jesse Helms, although of course Helms has his downsides as well.

Another thought: Mid-term elections are supposed to expose vulnerable incumbents who rode to office on the president's coattails - but Johnson, Landrieu and Cleland were all elected on Clinton's coattails in 1996.

If Cornyn loses by one vote, blame the Constitution for making Dick Cheney re-register in Wyoming.

It's the first day of Election Month!

For the NRO predictions contest, I'll have to commit:

1) The Senate split - 50 Republicans, 49 Democrats, 1 "Independent"
2) The House split - 219 Republicans, 214 Democrats, 1 "Independent"
3) Vote split in the South Dakota Tim Johnson/John Thune Senate race: Johnson 51%, Thune 48%
4) The vote split in the Arkansas Tim Hutchinson/Mark Pryor Senate race: Hutchinson 49%, Pryor 49%, Hutchinson wins
5) The vote split in the Minnesota Norm Coleman/ Walter Mondale Senate race: Coleman 49%, Mondale 45%
6) The vote split in the Jeb Bush/Bill McBride Florida governor’s race: Bush 53%, McBride 46%
Tie Breaker: The vote split in the New Hampshire Shaheen/Sununu Senate race: Shaheen 50%, Sununu 47%

Predictions: I'm not predicting the House races, although I suspect the House will be pretty close to a wash. Governors? Of the races I've followed, I'd say Pataki, Rowland, Bush and Gray Davis all get re-elected and the Dems hold Maryland (Townsend over Ehrlich), the GOP candidates win in Texas, and Massachusetts (Romney over O'Brien), but the Democrats pick up seats elsewhere.

The Senate? I say the Democrats hang on in South Dakota (Johnson over Thune), Georgia (Cleland over Chambliss), New Jersey (Lautenberg over Forrester) and cruise in Montana (Baucus) and Illinois (Durbin over Durkin). The Republicans hang on in Texas, North Carolina (Dole over Bowles), Colorado (Allard) and Arkansas (Hutchinson over Pryor) and cruise in South Carolina (Graham).

Changing hands: I see a GOP pickup in Missouri (Talent over Carnahan) and, yes, Norm Coleman over Fritz in Minnesota, but the Democrats gain a seat in New Hampshire (Shaheen over Sununu). That leaves a 1-seat GOP advantage with two seats: Mary Landrieau in a runoff in Louisiana, and Lincoln Chafee playing Hamlet in Rhode Island.

I voted this morning. Maybe it's just the options in New York, but the people leaving the polls all looked like they'd just done something they were ashamed of, like they were seen leaving a peep show or something. I actually pulled the lever for my liberal Democrat congressman, Gary Ackerman. It helped that he didn't have a Republican opponent, but under normal circumstances I would have registered a protest vote for the Conservative candidate. But Ackerman voted for war with Iraq - that alone earned a (symbolic) vote in his column.

Saw an ad last night run by GOP rep Felix Grucci (of the famous fireworks-making family) against opponent Tim Bishop, attacking Bishop's call for debt relief for the Third World, arguing that it would "cost Long Island taxpayers millions": "Tell Tim Bishop to stop putting Liberia ahead of Long Island." First time I'd seen that issue used by an opponent of debt relief. The pictures in the ad were just a grainy photo of Bishop and some maps.

Question: was Grucci playing the race card? If Bishop made this an issue, he can't well complain that it should be off limits for criticism, but the reference to Liberia, specifically, does seem gratuitous.

Mark Steyn on the Wellstone memorial. I tend to agree with Kaus on this one - I can forgive the Democrats for the crassness of the memorial, since they were plainly upset and people react to grief in funny ways. But both Steyn and Jonah Goldberg hit on the really cynical bit here, which is the Dems' use of Wellstone's still-warm corpse as a club to beat the Republicans for having the effrontery to do or say anything about the election, as all the while, the Democrats were holding a get-out-the-vote rally, filing lawsuits and having Tom Daschle rip Norm Coleman.

Remember in the comic strip "Bloom County," when Senator Bedfellow was defeated on the strength of an election-day headline, "WARNING: VOTING FOR BEDFELLOW MAY CAUSE HERPES"? Well, I'm watching this year's election news for the winner of this year's Bedfellow Award for the latest-arriving scandal to hit a candidate (the 2000 winner, of course, was George W. Bush's drunk driving flap). Right now, the Arkansas Senate race is in the lead! But give us time - the polls don't close until tomorrow evening!

The American Prowler has some harsh words (as you would expect) for Al Gore's "Florida Forever" campaign. Me, I'd say if Jeb Bush gets re-elected, that's a real good sign that the political winds have changed since December of 2000, and it's time for the Democrats to look for a party leader who wants to win the 2004 election, not one who wants to win the 2000 election.

Kaus:

A smooth election with winners and losers -- there's your Man Bites Dog story! .. Possible Floridas include 1) the Minnesota Hand Count; 2) the Landrieu Lacuna, in which the decisive Senate seat goes unfilled while Louisiana holds a runoff; and 3) the Talent Temporary Turnover, in which James Talent beats Jean Carnahan to fill the Missouri Senate seat to which Carnahan was appointed, takes office immediately, and temporarily gives the GOP a Senate majority with consequences (for Bush's judges, in particular) that are somewhat unclear. .... The person who sends in the most accurate disaster scenario wins a discount-bin copy of Jeffrey Toobin's unread Florida recount book. Scenarios involving litigation, high crimes, and misdemeanors accepted. Tie goes to the prediction with the most telling novelistic detail.

The Washington Times notes a split among the leaders of the African-American Left on Harry Belafonte's smear of Colin Powell: Charles Rangel and Al Sharpton (!) come to Powell's defense, while John Conyers signs on to the slur.

Lileks is, well, Lileks, with an ode to Jesse Ventura and some thoughts on why negative campaigning isn't such a turrrrrible thing.

Are New Jersey Democrats bringing back Willie Horton?

Man, Lileks is in the zone these days:

"I found the text of an upcoming Mondale ad. It accused Norm Coleman of giving public money to two companies that had laid off 750 workers last year.

Oh, that’s rich. Coleman did indeed lend public money to Lawson Software to lure them to build a big new office building in St. Paul - an $84 million loan made possible by tax-increment financing. I abhor outright gifts to companies just to convince them to build pretty buildings, but using TIF to revitalize downtown St. Paul is a defensible position. Reasonable people can argue about it. And when they’re tired of arguing about it, because it’s boring, they can chew on this:

Northwest Airlines received $230 million from the Federal Government in bailout money after 9/11.

Northwest has cut 10,000 jobs since 9/11.

Walter Mondale is on the Board of Directors of Northwest Airlines.

Oh: and Walter Mondale gets 24K in free airline travel a year from NWA.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS MEANS? Mechanics, laid off! Flight attendants, laid off! Baggage handlers, sent into the snow and forced to sell matches to buy a withered beet for supper, while Mondale sits in first class and has steak and pays nothing! Nothing!"

It gets better, as he takes apart Mondale's speech:

"'Iraq is dangerous, but going it alone is dangerous, too.'

Here he equates a nuke-armed Saddam with the consequences of deposing Saddam without a hall pass from France. They’re both ”Dangerous.” The first part, yes. That’s dangerous. The second part is “Dangerous” in the sense that Michael Jackson was “Bad.”"

I'll be quiet here for a while (check back later to see if my latest Projo column gets posted today). Go read Lileks' whole column, there's lots more there.

It was completely official that the Carl McCall campaign was toast when even the New York Times endorsed Pataki. What's sad is that McCall's trouncing may be taken in some quarters as evidence of the folly of an African-American candidate who, to his credit, has refused to play the race card, who made his name in statewide office rather than narrowcasting to a carefully gerrymandered legislative district, and has always run essentially as a moderate (Pataki's ads in the city have bashed McCall for being insufficiently liberal).

I'm on a roll with second-hand links here - this last-minute attempt by Shannon O'Brien to make Mitt Romney out as some sort of a he-man, woman-hating bully for his use of what frankly amounts to some prissy, bookish grammar is both ridiculous and contemptible.

Instapundit picked this one up: The New Republic reminds us that there's nothing in the world the GOP could have asked for, in its wildest dreams, more useful than having the Democratic party rally around Walter Mondale as a party leader a week before the election.

PJ O'Rourke, interviewed in the Atlantic: "one finds, especially by the time one reaches one's fifties, that there are a limited number of types of people in the world, and you went to high school with every single one of them. You can visit the Eskimos, you can visit the Bushmen in the Kalahari, you can go to Israel, you can go to Egypt, but everybody you meet is going to be somebody you went to high school with."

O'Rourke also has some provocative observations about conservatism and humor:

"Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification. The burden of proof should always be on people who want to restrict the individual's liberty and responsibility."

"That's different from conservatism. In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of "I hate strangers and anything that's different." But in its better forms, conservatism simply says that the structures of society, both civil and political, religious and so on, are the result of a long series of trial-and-error experiments by millions of human beings, not only all over the world, but through time. And that you should toss out received wisdom only very carefully. Obviously there are some ideas that were around for centuries that were not good (slavery comes to mind). But when people have been doing something for a millennium or two, there is probably a reason. And you better be pretty careful before you just throw it out."

Do you find that conservative humorists have a different humorous sensibility than liberal ones?

"Well, I don't know about that. I think that all humorists are essentially conservative, because humorists depend for a lot of their jokes on getting the reader or viewer or listener to laugh at things that are outlandish and strange. The audience is not laughing at things that are familiar or, as we may say, "conservative." The ridicule of the new and the odd is at the root of all humor, so in a way, even the most left-wing humorist is a conservative. Christopher Hitchens when he's being funny is an example of that."

O'Rourke's observation underlines why I, like most post-Reagan 'conservatives', am probably more libertarian than conservative, more apt to look at longstanding practices and ask why they can't be replaced with something that gives more autonomy to individuals and less control to government. As I've emphasized before, though, most people of my leanings continue to shy away from identifying with libertarianism because (1) in its doctrinal form, libertarianism doesn't just prefer individual autonomy to tradition; it raises individual autonomy to the kind of value that can almost never be outweighed by anything else; and (2) conservatism is much more respectful of religion and morality, which are the essential building blocks of a civil society.

While we're lingering on the ugly side of the Left, Jonah Goldberg is peering deep into the darkness of the soul of the Democratic Party, specifically the memorial service for Paul Wellstone, and is horrified by what (and who) he sees:

"Like some perverse "Where's Waldo" drawing, wherever large groups of Democrats congregate, you know if you can find Bill Clinton in the picture they will behave like jackasses . . that rally . . . shamelessly used Wellstone's death for partisan advantage while its organizers cynically accused their opponents of doing precisely that. Blaming others for something awful you've done is perhaps the defining attribute of Bill Clinton and his legacy on the Democratic party. Wellstone did many good things out of principle — including work with Jesse Helms, a man he grew to befriend, on human rights in China. But he will now be invoked by Democrats everywhere simply to get out the vote, beat up Republicans, and raise millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

In short, so long as they hold onto the Senate, the Clinton Democrats — who often found Wellstone's principles inconvenient — will find him more useful dead than alive. They will rewrite the story of his life to fit any cause they choose — much as they have done with other Democratic martyrs like John and Robert Kennedy (a Cold War anti-Communist and the attorney general who personally authorized the bugging of Martin Luther King, respectively). Wellstone's distinctiveness and honesty will melt in a warm pool of mass-marketed nostalgia. And, if Republicans complain, Democrats will simply charge insensitivity and laugh all the way to the bank."

Instapundit had a link to this story, but Glenn Reynolds' tag line didn't nearly do justice to Harry Stein's saga of how a Dallas newspaper deliberately and very falsely smeared him as a racist, apparently in an attempt to sandbag a potential nominee to be Federal Reserve chairman. The story captures perfectly the iron triangle of (1) a single audience member determined, possibly in advance, to take offense at Stein's talk; (2) reporters willing to be taken in by the claim; and (3) Democratic politicians looking to make hay on their absolute favorite topic. This is the kind of story that makes me so mad I can't even see straight; Stein's good name is trashed with the most malicious of intentions and for the basest of purposes, and he is left with utterly no recourse but to try to tell the whole story in all its length and nuance. Rod Dreher on NRO linked to this blog post reflecting on a similar story, about protestors determined to shut down truthful discussions of Islamic regimes' treatment of Christians and Jews. The truth, sadly, does not always set us free.

Andrew Sullivan and Rand Simberg point out that Ted Rall and Buffalo State College "journalism and media studies" professor Michael Niman need the tinfoil in their hats changed again.

Sullivan aptly catches the parallel to Vince-Foster-was-murdered theories in the paranoid Left's wish to charge George W. Bush with murdering Paul Wellstone. (James Taranto at Best of the Web Today also jumped on Niman's column yesterday).

Just a few funny ones: Rall: "spending a decade's worth of savings in six months . . . A man capable of these things seems, by definition, capable of anything" Gee, Ted, whaddya think of Gray Davis? Actually Rall probably thinks he's a right-wing nut case. Rall also cites, as evidence of Republican depravity, claims that "GOP workers phoned senior citizens to tell them that Wellstone was plotting to take away their Social Security." Of course, no Democrat would ever, ever suggest that an opponent intended to take away anyone's Social Security . . .

Besides, anyone can play this game. When John Heinz died in a plane crash, the Democrats gained a Senate seat, and the Republicans lost a family fortune that may some time soon bankroll John Kerry's presidential campaign. When Paul Coverdell died suddenly and without warning, the Democrats gained a Senate seat. When Mel Carnahan, who was trailing in the polls, died in a plane crash, the Democrats gained a Senate seat (note how Rall describes Carnahan's opponent as "future Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft" - as if anyone knew that in October 2000, and as if Ashcroft would have become the AG if he had won re-election). Now, a Democrat is endangered, and just as he appears to be momentarily ahead in the polls, he dies in a plane crash so the Dems can run a party veteran on his memory.

In other words, motive in politics is a two-way street, and using motive alone to make charges of murder is, to put it mildly, irresponsible. What's really insane is that my taxes pay Niman's salary, and that respectable journalistic organizations pay Rall's. Forget the outrageousness - the quality of this kind of stuff just isn't fit for the National Enquirer, let alone a major newspaper or university.

A new proposed EU constitution! With a President, federalism, common citizenship, and a common bill of rights, all under the title "United Europe"! Stop me if this sounds familiar. "Valery Giscard d'Estaing, president of the convention on the future of the EU, compared the draft constitution to the work done by the founding fathers of the US." Haven't we been led to believe that the French consider that an insult?

Dick Morris says Bush is losing popularity because he looks less Presidential when he's campaigning rather than stumping for war. His solution: stop campaigning! But this ignores the point of why his popularity matters right now: because there's an election around the corner. Bush can hoard his high ratings, or risk some of his more ephemeral support to get the Congress he needs.

Besides, the fair-weather Bush supporters - the hard-core Democrats who nonetheless back the President on the war - will come back when the war in Iraq starts, because their support is all about the war on terror. That is when he will need those people - they aren't going to vote for Republican congressional candidates in great numbers anyway, but they will keep the heat on poll-watching Congressional Democrats to support the war effort, and they may yet vote Bush in 2004.

You hate to link to the same people every day, but I laughed so hard at Lileks' Bleat this morning I almost fell off my chair. He takes on the Pet Shop Boys, Avril Lavigne, and Walter Mondale, and likes only one of the three. A taste of his observations on Mondale: "I was a hardcore Democrat [in 1984], and I remember watching the [convention] speech and thinking: we are going to lose. We are going to lose 51 states. Puerto Rico will demand statehood just for the chance not to vote for this guy. . . [Now] I just feel sorry for the guy. If he wins, he has to leave home, leave his family, leave his nice job, and go back to the ossuary of the Senate for six years. One night he’ll find himself staring at the lovely ceiling, listening to Robert Byrd drone on - for heaven’s sake he was talking when I left and twenty years later he still hasn’t shut up . . ."

Starting at this post and scrolling down, Ombudsgod has a good series of posts on inflated statistics about sexual assault, domestic violence and related topics. These are real problems, but it is always frightening to see the need implied in these types of fraudulent statistics -- the need to shock, the need to insist that these are the biggest, the worst problems. It's the one-upmanship (one-up-personship?) of the agenda of victimization at work, in which it is not only important to show that a problem exists and must be addressed, but that the problem is so vast that it calls for a thorough uprooting of the whole society. There's also, I think, another dynamic at work: the statistics are intentionally inflated because their proponents want people to dispute them, so that they can invoke wedge-issue rhetoric about how their voices are being ignored, how this is just like ancient rules about disbelieving women who cry "Rape," etc. Stuff like this shouldn't bother me this much, but it does. It's also why I love my job: one of the great joys of being a litigator is having the tools at your disposal to confront and puncture untruths, one at a time.

Peggy Noonan didn't know Paul Wellstone, but nonetheless has one of the better eulogies for the college professor who became the kind of Senator that most college professors would like to be.

Bob Novak's Saturday column, with more goodies including a replacement Senator in Alaska and more on the Louisiana Senate race and the prospects for a runoff.

Time to get down to the callous business of figuring out where the Minnesota Senate race goes after Wellstone . . . Lileks (a Minnesotan) has a lengthy explanation of why it's proper to remember the man well (I'm not excerpting it; go read for yourself) but is cold and withering in his assessment of the Democrats:

"If it’s Mondale as a replacement, it ought to make Wellstone’s supporters scowl a bit. The true heir to Wellstone’s policies would be the Green candidate - but oddly enough, none of his supporters are suggesting that anyone vote for that fellow. Policies are one thing; power is quite another. The objective is not to carry the Wellstone torch for the next six years. The objective is control of the Senate. The Wellstone legacy turns out to be no more than a seat marked D."

Sullivan's mailbag is also fighting back at Dana Milbank's Washington Post piece accusing Bush of playing fast and loose with the facts. The Post piece has its points, but one other one that struck me as funny was this charge:

"In stop after stop across the country, Bush has cited an impressive statistic in his bid to get Congress to approve terrorism insurance legislation. "There's over $15 billion of construction projects which are on hold, which aren't going forward -- which means there's over 300,000 jobs that would be in place, or soon to be in place, that aren't in place," is how he put it last week in Michigan.

But these are not government estimates. The $15 billion figure comes from the Real Estate Roundtable, a trade group that is leading the fight for the legislation and whose members have much to gain. After pleas earlier this year from the White House for "hard evidence" to make its case for terrorism insurance, the roundtable got the information from an unscientific survey of members, who were asked to provide figures with no documentation.

The 300,000 jobs number, the White House said, was supplied by the carpenters' union. But a union official said the White House apparently "extrapolated" the number from a Transportation Department study of federal highway aid -- not private real estate -- that the union had previously cited."

(Emphasis mine). You see? If it's not a government estimate, quoth Milbank, it can't possibly be the truth! This is like the whole Paul Krugman/Jonathan Chait/Al Hunt argument that Bush lies about his economic policies - far too many such charges are simply arguments that Bush is failing to conform to government estmates - including the longstanding Congressional Budget Office policy of assuming that tax rates have absolutely zero impact on the economy or individual behavior. Personally, I'm glad we don't live in a country where most people assume you're a liar if you contradict government estimates, especially ones that assume away inconvenient realities. Which is why people like Krugman and Chait and Hunt get so frustrated that they can't convince people that Bush is lying: because the average guy understands full well, without having to study the issue, that the next long-term government budget forecast to be accurate will be the first.

Some random blog goodies:

Lawyer/Blogger Stuart Buck with the transcript of a FOX interview of liberal journalist Juan Williams, on why some in the African-American community see him as a "black conservative".

Economist/Blogger 'Jane Galt' on intellectual honesty in debates about the budget, Social Security and economics in general.

A link from Buck, on the Iraq-Oklahoma City investigation.

How To Argue on Usenet, from Brunching Shuttlecocks.

Andrew Sullivan also had some good comments on a Howard Fineman piece that struck me as hysterical (crazy hysterical, not funny hysterical) in its plea for more George W. in place of Chief Moose: "One difference bwteen [sic] this president and the last is that Bush doesn't feel the need to be the country's permanent emotional counselor."

Dave Kopel & Paul Blackman, writing on NRO, argue that the proposal for gun barrel 'fingerprinting,' which has gained some cache from the DC sniper case, is impractical and dangerous. Their arguments are worth considering at some length for what they do and don't prove.

Read More »

Am I paranoid, or does it appear that the withdrawal of Mike Taylor from the Montana Senate race was a calculated publicity stunt all along, as a way to get national attention to the unfairness of Max Baucus' ad campaign? Now that Taylor's back in the race, and suddenly with cheerleaders in the national media, you have to wonder. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The Senate races keep getting tighter, according to some reports: in a Democrat-held seat in Georgia, and Republican-held seats in Texas and North Carolina.

Mickey Kaus has been trumpeting Michael McConnell's trashing of Bush v. Gore on Slate, but don't forget to check out his later piece on OpinionJournal on the same subject.

LILEKS with another reminder of why I send my kids to Catholic school:

Let me be quite clear on this: my daughter is not going to pledge allegiance to healthy dirt. I will teach her all I believe about stewardship of the world. . . . I will teach her that the earth - lower case, no family affiliation - requires our care and respect. But I am not going to raise an eco-freak who tattles on Daddy to the Block Captain because I threw away a grocery bag that had a rip, instead of cutting it up for note paper. She is a resident of the planet earth, but she is a citizen of the United States of America. While that distinction will be meaningless in second grade I will not undercut her eventual understanding of the concept by pretending that we all pledge allegiance to dirt, crabgrass and crocodiles. Respect them, yes. Start the day with an oath bowing our heads to decreased atomospheric particulate levels, no.

* * *

[I]f you think I’m being paranoid here, consider that my child is two years old, and they want her to swear fealty to soil. I wouldn’t mind some sort of pledge or oath to vow to be a good Dirt Scout, to not litter, to promise to pick up dog poop, to reuse grocery bags. I’ve no problem with that. But this stupid thing uses the language of religion and civics to underscore a practical point, and that tells me something. When you set it up a pledge to the meter of the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, I’ll take you at your word. Either you regard this as more important or just as important, and on those points reasonable people can disagree.

Fat lot of good it’ll do you; tonight while googling around for info on the matter, I learned that the pledge [of allegiance to Earth] is required reading for first graders in the Minneapolis School System. (emphasis in original)

Bob Novak says that Congress went home without officially recessinng because "A formal vote to go home would have opened members of Congress from both parties to campaign charges that they quit without passing homeland security or prescription drugs aid." But that charge can be made anyway. Isn't the real reason for avoiding a formal recess because Tom Daschle doesn't want the president making recess appointments to the federal bench, especially before the election? After the election, Bush will either get his Senate majority or have to calculate how to live with the Dems for two more years. But if they recess now, he could appoint a couple of judges - say, Miguel Estrada and Patricia Owen - and by doing so, make the showdown over judicial appointments (especially female and racial/ethnic minority appointments) into the top (domestic) issue of the campaign in states where the issue favors Republicans. Daschle may prefer to avoid that, as well as avoiding the inevitable erosion of Senate priveleges that would come if Bush followed the Clinton precedent on this one.

As the New Republic said of Al Gore, "bitterness is not a policy position." Michael Barone, with his usual analytical precision, says the Democrats have failed as well to learn this lesson on the economy; as a result, Barone thinks the Democrats won't benefit nationally from the woes of the economy. I would put it this way: people who have lost their jobs may blame Republicans, but people whose 401(k)s got hit mostly remember that most of the damage happened before Bush got the centerpiece of his economic plan passed in May 2001, let alone after it became effective, or after September 11.

A MUST-READ column from Bob Novak this morning (really, a must even if you're a Democrat) on the dilemma now facing President Bush in California: fish with Bill Simon, on the basis of a single poll showing he's competitive, or cut bait from his flailing campaign? Personally I don't think Gray Davis will run for president, and I don't think Bush will win California in 2004 unless he's winning in a landslide anyway, but the decision is still important - just making California competitive again will drain huge resources from the Democrats.

If I'm Simon, I'm going nothing but negative, and on Davis' record, the rest of the way. The only way Simon wins is to relentlessly ask the question, "Are we prepared to accept that we just can't do any better than Gray Davis?" It worked for George Pataki in 1994.

It's just never good news for the Democrats when this happens: Charlie Rangel and Al Sharpton play the race card against the national Democrats for not supporting Carl McCall.

Rod Dreher reminds me of another reason why I voted for McCain. One thing that amazes me on the whole North Korea fiasco: I really think it speaks volumes about Clinton's character that he's so trusting of other people, which is an unusual characteristic in a pathological liar. It must spring from one of two sources: (1) as I've speculated previously, Clinton really doesn't recognize his own dishonesty, so he therefore fails to see it in others as well, or (2) Clinton is so accustomed to putting one over on the other guy that he talks himself into believing that he's one step ahead even when he's manifestly not.

Making fun of Maureen Dowd is so easy and tempting as to be the webpundit equivalent of an Elvis impersonation. But this one on NRO had some good zingers that amused me:

The minimum requirement for membership in the intelligentsia used to be, well, intelligence. This is no longer the case. Rather, what is now required is the mere sense of your own superiority, the smirky confidence that flows from an undergraduate grasp of history, philosophy, and literature, and which can only be sustained by a maniacal deafness to counterarguments. Listening to your political opponents is deadly under such circumstances; they must therefore be dismissed, a priori, as stupid . . . The problem isn't that the new elites are consciously attempting to paint whoever disagrees with them as stupid; it's that they really believe that only stupid people could possibly disagree with them.

I should add that this blinkered refusal to consider even the possibility of error, particularly in the younger generations (as opposed to the fiftysomething Dowd) flows directly from the nature of our institutions of higher education and the 'mainstream' media, which for decades have taught and reinforced only a single point of view. I recall when I was on the college debate circuit back in the Bush the Elder Administration, and my debate partner and I (both Republicans) mischievously picked the debate topic (if you went first, you picked the topic) that "BE IT RESOLVED, Dan Quayle is too stupid to be a heartbeat away from the presidency." Counter to our own beliefs, we launched into a tirade against the vice president, relying heavily on conventional wisdom. The other side, from Cornell, complained that we had given them an indefensible argument. This poor girl from Cornell wound up leaving nearly in tears; she couldn't even imagine that one would be asked to defend Dan Quayle.

FoxNews reports on political hijinks in Hawaii, although I'm skeptical until I see proof that Democratic dominance of the islands has been punctured.

The Wall Street Journal has a front-page story this morning (here's the link if you're a subscriber) on how Smith & Wesson has rejoined the fight against gun regulations in an environment where lawsuits and new regulations have lost a lot of steam as a result of skeptical courts and the Bush Administration. Personally, I always thought the lawsuits - other than those few for purely accidental shootings that might have been prevented by safety devices, which are fairly standard tort claims -- were silly. First, everybody knows guns are dangerous. Second, many of the claims were based on the theory that it was a violation of one state's gun policies to sell too many guns legally in another state, knowing that some of them would then be shipped across state lines (the "oversupply" theory). Adopting such a rule under state law is a straightforward violation of the Commerce Clause - a state regulating the very act of interstate commerce. (A more interesting question is whether both the high- and low-regulation states are transgressing Federalism's Edge, a concept I've discussed in more detail here and here).

BUT, WILL THE DC SNIPER CHANGE THE POLITICS OF GUN CONTROL? Not much, I suspect. Except in New Jersey -- where the Torricautenberg campaign has been hammering the issue for months -- nearly all the contested Senate elections, and the majority of hot House and governor's contests, are in states where gun control is not popular (Missouri, New Hampshire, Colorado, Arizona, Michigan, the Carolinas, etc.), so the national Democrats have been terrified of the issue. What's worse, the case raises the specter of a ban on hunting rifles, the crown jewel of gun ownership.

Personally, I'm pretty moderate on this issue - I'm generally apt to support gun regulation like registration requirements, but not outright bans. After all, the Second Amendment guarantees an individual's right to bear arms, but much unlike the First Amendment (which says "Congress shall make no law" regulating speech and religion), the Second Amendment expressly contemplates that gun ownership by the militia - i.e., the able-bodied adult (then, male) population - shall be "well-regulated." I'm not an expert on the history, but I doubt that the Founding Fathers would have been alarmed by efforts to register the gun owners in the State if they'd seen a need.

The things people will ask for . . . Second Circuit says it's not unconstitutional to deny people with multiple homes in different localities the right to vote in all of them.

Some good Michael Moore bashing here - Moore makes the point that you can't trust some of his most prominent critics because he's such a jerk that they all have a personal animus against him. OK, that's not how he puts it. (Link via Instapundit)

I'll leave you with this last charming article, on a site that MSNBC permits Alterman to perma-link to in his "Bookmarks". I guess Alterman thinks stuff like this is cute:

"Bush II has not yet achieved Nazi Germany's horror at its apex, but it is like waiting for the other shoe to drop."

"It's sincerely hard to believe that Bush II's "Final Solution" includes the elimination of an entire race."

Gee, thanks, that's generous. So how are Bush and Hitler different?

"One of the main differences between Bush and Hitler as leaders is that the later built a nation out of rubble . . . Hitler helped to create and then triumphed over the political unrest that plagued post war Germany. During the early years under his leadership, Germany experienced a period of rebirth and pride in the Fatherland. The economy improved greatly and, as witnessed during the 1936 Olympics, the world was introduced to a new Deutschland. The world saw a proud and thriving country rise out of a once devastated enemy. George W. Bush, on the other hand, has taken a country that enjoyed peace and prosperity for almost a decade and trashed it completely.."

Glad you cleared that up.

It goes on and on and on like this, comparing Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and Karen Hughes and FCC Chairman Michael Powell to Goehring and Goebbels . . . why do reputable organizations like MSNBC hire people like Alterman who have so little judgment that they would consider a site like this enlightening? And doesn't a Big Media organization that wants to burnish its image by adding a "blog" still have cause for concern about that image when the blogger in question gives his endorsement to this sort of lunatic rant?

Ever ask yourself, "I wonder what Mark Green is up to these days, after suffering one of the most humilaiting exits from electoral politics in history?"

I didn't think so, but Green turns up anyway, subbing for Eric Alterman, and bestowing upon us this sage advice: "although issues such as terrorism, social security, health care, and pollution absorb far more public attention and concern, the scandal of strings-attached money corrupting politics and government is the most urgent problem in America today-because it makes it harder to solve nearly all our other problems. How can we produce smart defense, environmental, and health policies if arms contractors, oil firms, and HMOs have such a hammerlock over the committees charged with considering reforms? How can we adequately fund education and child care if special interests win special tax breaks that deplete public resources?" (emphasis mine) And this clunker: "Because the press and public judge a candidacy by its treasury, and because no one can be sure how much will be “enough,” candidates feel the pressure to engage in financial overkill, just as the Soviets and Americans did with nuclear missiles in their arms race."

Wow, that's a lot of different varieties of foolishness to pack into such a short space . . (1) the complete lack of perspective in putting campaign finance reform ahead of terrorism on any list - I may think it's funny, as a former McCain voter, that I get mail from his PAC saying "help me defeat the influence of money in politics - send $100!", but at least McCain hasn't confused his favorite straw man with the real threats to the nation. Oh, and which national party is siding with its campaign contributors in the fight over the structure of the Homeland Security bill? (2) Perhaps we can "adequately fund education and child care" if we do it at the local level. "Enron" probably didn't buy influence at your local School Board, and you can raise property taxes without raising money from Global Crossing. But then, that would require you to pay for this stuff yourself. (3) Do you think he means the Senate committees? I doubt it. (4) The throughly gratuitous moral equivalence between the U.S. and the Soviet Union - why do people like Green try to re-fight the Cold War in totally unrelated discussions, when their side (being charitable, I mean appeasement of Communism, not Communism itself) didn't win? (5) Green grumbles about "self-financing multimillionaires," which sounds an awful lot like Whitey Herzog complaining about the unfairness of home field advantage in the World Series.

For added humor, you can go to Green's website, which has the hilarious and ungrammatical slogan "Don't let them run our democracy -- the way they ran Enron" (who, Ken Lay? I think Enron's management has been stalled in his tracks pretty effectively. But isn't the charge against Enron that the company had bad management with obscure finances and too little accountability, not that its pure-hearted management was bought out by moneyed outside interests?) and fumes about the "evil of access" to Congress.

Friday's New York Sun had a good word to say for Hillary Clinton's support for war with Iraq, and I second the thought:

"In the case of Mrs. Clinton, we were struck, too, by her desire to preserve the powers of the presidency itself. The other day in this space, we remarked that Vice President Gore’s failure to grasp this point marks him as a man of who belongs in the Congress more than in the executive branch. Mrs. Clinton, however, clearly has not made this error. 'I want this president, or any future president, to be in the strongest possible position to lead our country in the United Nations or in war,' quoth she. Her reference to 'any future president' can not be lost on anyone. To which we say, good for Mrs. Clinton. It’s nice to see at least one Democrat trying to protect the office for a future holder."

Translation: If Al Gore were half the man that Hillary is . . . and in all seriousness, I mean that with no disrespect to Mrs. Clinton. Of course, there are practical differences. Gore worries about satisfying the Left in the primaries and the Greens in the general election; Hillary can fairly claim (as Reagan once did to conservatives) to be such the complete embodiment of the movement as to be beyond criticism. Gore's out of office; Hillary represents New York State, which after September 11 is still an angry electorate. Gore, a Vietnam vet who supported the first Gulf War, plans to run against Bush and feels he can't afford to be a me-too; Hillary plans to run in 2008 (and not against an incumbent president Gore, either), recognizes that the war with Iraq will be long since won by then, and knows that it's more important to burnish her credentials as a potential commander-in-chief than to play to the Left (she can handle that by opposing whatever war we're fighting six years from now).

Orrin Judd says Frank Lautenberg should benefit from "the Carnahan effect," but really, that effect was just a sympathy vote for a grieiving widow; Lautenberg should have precisely the opposite. In fact, Lautenberg is a most unsympathetic type, a rich man who won his seat by a campaign of personal attacks on an old woman, and a guy who was involved in the dirtiest race (on both sides) I can ever remember, the 1988 Senate race pitting him against Republican Pete Dawkins. Republicans keep getting the shaft from these unforeseen events: the Torricelli shuffle, the death of Carnahan (who didn't pass Ashcroft at the polls until he was dead), the sudden death of Paul Coverdell.

The Nobel committee said they wanted to give President Bush the finger for his Iraq policy by giving the Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter. Hey, if that was the idea, why not go all the way and give it to Al Gore?

Goldberg also has the transcript of a hilarious anti-Lautenberg ad being run by the GOP in New Jersey.

The Corner had a link to this marvelous NY Observer piece about leaving the Left, with regrets. Here's a brilliant analogy, one reminiscent of Allan Bloom's assault on Heidegger as the paradigm of intellectual folly and cowardice in The Closing of the American Mind, but with props to Little Green Footballs:

[L]et me make an analogy here, one that I believe goes to the "root cause" of Left idiocy of this sort.

The analogy that occurred to me grew out of a conversation I had several years ago with the philosopher Berel Lang, author of Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, a talk that took place in the course of researching my book, Explaining Hitler. Mr. Lang is an extremely thoughtful and meticulous thinker on the question of degrees of evil, and the role of intentionality in determining them. He was speaking about the question of whether one could say there was "a history of evil"—whether Hitler represented a new fact, a new landmark in that history, and if so, what the next step might be.

I suggested the "next step" might be Holocaust denial, because the deniers had found a diabolical way to twist the knife, compounding the pain of the survivors by negating and slandering the memory of the murdered.

Mr. Lang demurred, because he had his own notion of what the next step in the history of evil might be. The paradigm for it, he told me, was the postwar career of Martin Heidegger, the Nazi-friendly philosopher beloved to distraction by postmodernists (and Hannah Arendt).

All of whom apologized for him, despite an increasingly damning series of revelations that disclosed his toadying to Hitler’s thugs in order to attain professional advancement, hailing Hitler’s Reich as the ultimate synthesis of politics and his philosophy.

But that wasn’t what made Heidegger a new chapter, Mr. Lang said; it was his astonishing postwar behavior. After everything came out, after it was no longer possible to deny at least post facto knowledge of the Holocaust, nothing changed for Heidegger. He felt no need to incorporate what happened into his philosophy. "His silence," Mr. Lang said, "it wasn’t even denial. For him, it wasn’t important! It wasn’t important …. Now if you ask which of them is worse … the Revisionists [Holocaust deniers] deny it occurred, but their official position, at least, is that if it occurred, it would have been wrong. But Heidegger knows it occurred, but it’s just not important—it’s not something to distort history to deny. For Heidegger, this is not history to concern oneself with.

Not history to concern oneself with ….

Here’s the analogy: Heidegger’s peculiar neutrality-slash-denial about Nazism and the Holocaust after the facts had come out, and the contemporary Left’s curious neutrality-slash-denial after the facts had come out about Marxist genocides—in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, after 20 million, 50 million, who knows how many millions had been slaughtered. Not all of the Left; many were honorable opponents. But for many others, it just hasn’t registered, it just hasn’t been incorporated into their "analysis" of history and human nature; it just hasn’t been factored in. America is still the one and only evil empire. The silence of the Left, or the exclusive focus of the Left, on America’s alleged crimes over the past half-century, the disdainful sneering at America’s deplorable "Cold War mentality"—none of this has to be reassessed in light of the evidence of genocides that surpassed Hitler’s, all in the name of a Marxist ideology. An ideology that doesn’t need to be reassessed. As if it was maybe just an accident that Marxist-Leninist regimes turned totalitarian and genocidal. No connection there. The judgment that McCarthyism was the chief crime of the Cold War era doesn’t need a bit of a rethink, even when put up against the mass murder of dissidents by Marxist states.

The point is, all empires commit crimes; in the past century, ours were by far the lesser of evils. But this sedulous denial of even the possibility of misjudgment in the hierarchy of evils protects and insulates this wing of the Left from an inconvenient reconsideration of whether America actually is the worst force on the planet. This blind spot, this stunning lack of historical perspective, robs much of the American Left of intellectual credibility. And makes it easy for idiocies large and small to be uttered reflexively. (Perhaps the suggestion I recently saw on the Instapundit.com Web site calling for an "Anti-Idiotarian" party might be appropriate.)

Mickey Kaus has a cautionary note in the wake of the latest New York Times poll issue:

"About a year ago a brilliant essay by right-winger J. Peter Mulhern argued that liberal press bias is a blessing for conservatives and Republicans, because with liberal bias comes the liberal "cocoon," the disconnect between what NPR listeners/NYT readers think -- after being told what they want to hear -- and what's really going on. Because prominent Times articles like Nagourney's give Democrats (even sophisticated pols and media types) unfounded hope, Democrats are apt to be overconfident -- and surprised on election day when they discover what the voters really believe.

But I wonder if a reverse, second-order phenomenon isn't also at work – a conservative cocoon built on the assumption that all bad news in the NYT is the product of liberal bias. There's so much bias in the Times right now that this is a mighty tempting conclusion. But it's a dangerous one for the right."

Rod Dreher at NRO continues his campaign against Al Sharpton with a review of Sharpton's new book. I've said this before: I can easily see Sharpton destroying the Democrats in 2004, reprising what he did to Mark Green - and especially if Joe Lieberman gets the lead.

Dreher quotes Sharpton heaping glowing praise on Castro's Cuba: "To my surprise, the best fried chicken I have ever ate in my life (outside of my mama's) was in Havana. Cuba is very clean, and the only crime you could openly see is prostitution. You don't see a lot of dirt and crime. People even leave their doors unlocked there. It reminded me of the deep, deep South in the 1950s, where everyone greeted each other as they walked by. Even the cars are from the 1950s. ...It was like stepping into Mayberry with Andy Griffith. I expected Aunt Bea and Opie to come running out any minute"

Is it just me, or -- well, what to you think Sharpton would do to, say, George W. Bush if he spoke warmly of "the deep, deep South in the 1950s" and a TV show set in the South in that era where everybody was white?

Now, commentators often accuse the media generally and the NY Times specifically of bias and error. The bias allegations are easy ones to debate, and the disputes about what constitutes bias can be pretty straightforward. Claims of error require proof that the paper has screwed up outside sources or something . . . there's often a spirited debate between the critics and the paper's defenders, sometimes involving the paper's reponse at the end.

This is different.

David Tell of the Weekly Standard accuses the Times, in so many words, of a deliberate "fraud" in its reporting of its own poll numbers. (Personally, I read only the opening of the Times piece when we got the paper - yes, I'm a subscriber, don't ask why - and found it tendentious on its face). Them's fightin' words, and grounds for a libel lawsuit if he's wrong. Read the article; this may sound unremarkable in the history of fights about the Times, but this one could really have some traction because it goes straight to the heart of the Times' page-1 campaign to discredit the President and the war effort, and the lengths to which that campaign will go.

The usual 'pox on both houses' types say that California's governor's race has been "lacking in a discussion of the issues." Gee, which candidate spent the whole summer attacking a civil jury verdict and tax returns, and talking about a single issue (abortion) that has nearly nothing to do with the job of California governor? Davis has the discussion right where he wants it. It's Simon who desperately needs the discussion to be about Davis' record on economics, education and similar issues.

The Corner on NRO flagged this one: House Democrat Jim McDermott, fresh from denouncing American foreign policy in Baghdad before an uncritical George Stephanopolous, now says that President Bush is engaged in a "bloodless, silent coup": "This president is trying to bring to himself all the power to become an emperor — to create Empire America." You can't make this stuff up. I think the lesson to be drawn here is that a decade of relative peace has allowed a variety of radicals to get elected or re-elected without voter scrutiny of even the most extreme and paranoid views of the American political system. Next McDermott will be talking about politicians bugging the phones of their opponents.

If you haven't, you need to check out OxBlog's Josh Chafetz and his "Immutable Laws of Maureen Dowd," now posted on the Weekly Standard's website. I'd add one more corollary: when was the last time you saw Dowd reference anything (except her own personal experiences) that didn't appear on the front page of her own newspaper?

This Fox News report notes the heavy schedule of debates, and lack of spending on TV ads, in the Vermont gubernatorial race. What seems missing, to me, is any mention of Act 64, Vermont's stringent new campaign finance law, which was upheld by the Second Circuit in August. (This NRO analysis boldly predicted a reversal by the Supreme Court, although near as I can tell, no petition has been filed as yet). Are they not in effect yet this campaign cycle?

Supreme Court opens its 2002 term denying cert in scores of cases, including the New Jersey election case (click here for the link to the order list, a 94-page PDF file). But the story's not over: there were potential standing and jurisdiction problems with the appeal from the NJ Supreme Court -- but a new federal lawsuit in NJ, brought by people who voted already, may give the courts the evidentiary record to make a definitive ruling on the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act claim -- and better yet, from the Supreme Court's perspective, to let federal courts decide those issues without the High Court's involvement, rather than replay another showdown with a state Supreme Court.

Every time you are stuck debating (contradictorily) whether (1) the Democrats are really just people of good faith who disagree or (2) the Democrats have sunk so low they can't possibly go any lower, you get hit with something that calls both assumptions into question, such as: an ad (on what else? Social Security) depicting President Bush pushing an old woman in a wheelchair off a cliff. I swear you can not make this stuff up. Frankly, if there's a single word I would use to describe these type of tactics, it's this one: immature. I have no problem with harsh, negative attacks and invective, in proper place. If we could just raise the level of debate to that of a mature adult, we would be so much better off. Every time you hear a political ad, ask yourself: could you make this argument with a straight face to your friends? If not, why do the political pros make them?

Man, this is cold. I bet the Sulzbergers go to bed every night cursing the internet.

This headline reminded me of Dave Barry's comment about the Constitutional Convention, where he discussed how some states wanted a strong president and a weak legislature, some wanted a weak president and a strong legislature, and "delegates from New York wanted a loud president and a rude legislature." The actual story is interesting as well - the UK is openly pushing for the creation of . . . well, a position in the EU without much more authority than Her Majesty. Of course, such a figurehead would embody the bureaucracy in Brussles and become an instant lightning rod, and would it be a German or a Frenchman? Sounds to me like a plan to help undermine the whole project.

I'm still too busy for much blogging, but no matter what you're doing today, you are not too busy to read Mark Steyn's taxonomy of the Democrats' positions on the war. Sample:

"the Democrats found themselves with the rare double problem of figuring out a way to spin both the obvious opportunism of their belated approval for the war and the obvious opportunism of Gore's belated opposition to it."

The usual suspects - Instapundit, Kaus, Sullivan (links on my left) - lead the roundup on the New Jersey Supreme Court's decision that "51 days" doesn't mean "51 days" if it's applied to a candidate from one of the major parties (at least the court had the decency to pretend that its ruling would apply to Republicans).

Question 1: What happens if some voter who got the original ballots (let's say, for example, a Patterson native serving in Kabul or Qatar) sends it back and doesn't have time to look at the new ballot? Or what if he gets confused or concerned about his vote counting, and sends back both? Does one or both votes count, if the election is really close? Does it matter who he voted for? Will a vote for the Torch be counted for Lautenberg? (What if some serviceman wanted to reward the Torch for his position - whatever it is - on the war? Are we now back to not caring what the soldiers think about that? That was fast.)

Question 2: Is it now too late for some third-party candidate (i.e., not the Republicans) to intervene to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court (or file a federal action, which would probably face collateral estoppel problems)? Professor Eugene Volokh (as well as Kaus and Sullivan) attacks the decision's assumption that the dispositive issue is whether the candidate dropping off the ballot leaves any "voter choice," which therefore would not apply if, say, Jesse Ventura or Ross Perot or Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan or Bernie Sanders or Jim Jeffords dropped off the ballot (hey, do Vermont voters have choices?). A non-party generally has a real hard time intervening, but this one went straight to the Supreme Court so fast they may have had little chance to get organized. I don't have my thinking cap on that one, but if you could get around the procedural issue, it's a heck of an angle and the US Supreme Court (liberals included) would likely be much more intrigued than by some GOP protest.

And you thought politicians who talk until they are blue in the face was just a figure of speech.

More news on the plan for a back-room deal to have party bosses replace an embattled loser.

Rod Dreher is packing his bags for December in Louisiana to decide the fate of the Senate. Is Landrieau actually endangered? That would be news to me, but I haven't followed that race much.

LILEKS goes after the New York Times' argument that a New Jersey statute prohibiting the Democrats from substituting a new candidate on the ballot for Torricelli on the grounds that "The guiding principle should be the voters' basic right to a genuine election." As Lileks puts it:

"If the law is upheld, then “democracy” is thwarted. Really? There will be an election with a ballot whose names are the ones chosen by voters in the primary. Sounds “democratic” to me. After all, Toricelli didn’t quit because he discovered an eight-pound neoplasm in his small intestine, or had his brain turned into a fine red mist when a marble-sized meteorite from the Oort cloud struck him in a 7-11 parking lot. He’s not even under indictment. He resigned because there was such a bad odor coming from him and his campaign that actual wavy cartoon stink lines were coming off him, and the cameras were starting to pick it up. He was going to lose. So he quit."

I would add to this one more point: it's not just that Torricelli is on the ballot - he's still in the Senate. He's still voting on the budget, homeland security, judges, . . . he'll still get to vote on sending Americans to war. You ordinary schmucks back in Montvale and Camden and Weehawken won't have that privilege. Since when is it an affront to Democracy and Genuine Elections to force a party to run a living, breathing incumbent Senator for re-election?

(In a real Democracy, we could have a Genuine Election if the candidate was dead as a doornail, apparently, just not one who's dead in the polls. Where was the Times when the Republicans were stuck running Bob Dole for president?)

(By the way, the Dems aren't the only New Jersey pols who use this trick - remember when the incumbent Governor, Don DiFrancesco, got caught . . . well, being generally unpopular and unethical, and the state GOP endeavored not only to replace him on the ballot with Bob Franks, but to delay the primary and transfer all his campaign funds as well? The good news is, the primary voters saw this for the sham it was, and the supposedly Extremist Right-Wing challenger, Bret Schundler, walked off with a stunning upset that served as a bracing rebuke to the state party machine. We can hope.)

Upon hearing that Congressman James McDermott has been in Baghdad criticizing the Bush Administration and lauding the need to place our trust in our enemies, some of you may be asking, "McDermott . . . that name sounds familiar, doesn't it?" Here's why: you may remember McDermott as the guy who had to resign from the House Ethics committee, and was sued by Congressman John Boehner, for publishing an illegal tape recording of an internal telephone conference between House Republicans. (In a postscript, the lawsuit was ultimately rejected after the Supreme Court, in Bartnicki v. Vopper, found the provisions of the statute barring disclosures derived from illegal wiretaps to be overbroad).

Michael Barone argues that Paul Wellstone is nearly the only endangered incumbent Democrat who's likely to vote against the war. My guess is, that will kill him in Minnesota - not a real conservative state, to put it mildly, but one where it will be easy to bring out the 'swing' voters who voted for The Body and Ross Perot, who aren't easy to get to the polls but might rise in anger at a senator who's on the wrong side of the war issue. And you know what? Wellstone's just the type of "I'd rather be right than president" politician who might welcome the opportunity to spend the rest of his life getting applause from little crowds of embittered Leftists with his tale of how his principled opposition to war cost him his Senate seat (better that, than having to wonder if it was breaking the two-terms pledge that did it).

ABSOLUTELY THE LAST WORD ON AL GORE'S SPEECH

If you're a Democrat looking for a reason to abandon Al Gore, here's another one: he's tipping his pitches. I was thinking the other day that I can't remember a speech that triggered so much well-written, dead-on-target commentary - from friends, not just foes - in such a short span. OK, there have been some big targets, like Clinton's August 17, 1998 non-apology, Gore's 2000 convention speech or Pat Buchanan's speech to the 1992 GOP Convention. But like a pitcher who's seen the same team too much lately, Gore is now facing a united front of politicos, pundits, editorialists, and bloggers who know his whole routine and his characteristic failings so well that they can see them coming a mile away when he launches into a speech. People know what notes to take, and they come away with an endless bag of put-downs for the man. Put another way: everybody knows by now how to hit Gore.

I've already linked to a ton of these; just check out Jonah Goldberg and Charles Krauthammer and you will see what I mean. Even The New Republic, a neophyte at Gore-bashing, had this to say: "And so you're back from outer space. I just walked in to find you here, with that sad look upon your face. I should have changed that stupid lock. I should have made you leave your key. If I had known for just one second you'd be back to bother me." Oops, what Gore's longest-suffering supporters said was that his "speech . . . consisted of neither honest criticism nor honest opposition. Rather, it sounded like a political broadside against a president who Gore no doubt feels occupies a post that he himself deserves. But bitterness is not a policy position."

Get off the stage, and bring on a new guy so everyone can say, "what's his angle?" and the optimists can project upon him their earnest hopes for the Party, and us right-wing nut cases have to go fill a new clippings file. Instead, Gore winds up, and everyone in the park knows the eephus pitch is coming. Or, in this case, the spitter.

I haven't seen this anywhere else - a California court yesterday vacated an injunction issued by a lower court and threw out a lawsuit filed by Gray Davis' campaign committee against the American Taxpayers' Alliance, which had alleged that ATA violated California's campaign finance laws by running an advertisement that "has no other purpose than to denigrate Governor Davis." What kind of country would let just anyone denigrate the Governor, on television no less? The court found that the lawsuit ran afoul of a California statute prohibiting "SLAPP" (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation") and the First Amendment because the ad, while critical of The Governor, did not expressly advocate his defeat in an election. (Of course, campaign finance 'reformers' may take heart from the court's distinction of other cases on the grounds that the ad ran in June 2001 when "no election was imminent . . . [t]he primary and general gubernatorial elections in 2002 were 8 months and 18 months away, respectively."

Saw the TV tape of Tom Daschle flipping his lid on the Senate floor yesterday. So, OK, it's dirty pool for the GOP to accuse the Democrats of being unconcerned about national security for blocking the new Homeland Security Department until the Dems can force the department to keep civil service protections that make it insanely difficult to discipline or fire people and thus hold them accountable for their performance? Well, somebody with a search engine and a few hours to spare should check on what the Democrats and their friends at the NY Times and elsewhere were saying last October and November about Republican opposition to their plan to federalize airport security. Betcha betcha betcha find a whole mother load of accusations of Republicans putting profits over national security and the like. How soon we forget.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan thinks Daschle just lost his cool from being pushed by both sides on the war when he wants to talk about other issues. I wonder if the Tom Harkin scandal is a factor too - one more bit of bad news that could undermine Daschle's strategy for keeping the Senate.

Speaking of Homeland Job Security, Mickey Kaus suggests a 50/50 plan: give 50% of the employees job security. What an office-politics nightmare that would be - don't you think the civil service employees, by their permanence, would acquire great influence over whether the other half get fired? -- and you'd just be committing to have half the people do most of the work. Instead, how about a 10% rule - say, in each sector of the Department (Coast Guard, INS, Border Patrol, etc.) you could only terminate the employment of 10% of the work force each year without triggering notice and hearing protections. Many times you wouldn't need to go that far, and if you had an incident big and ugly enough to require a bigger purge, you'd probably be able to handle the hearings by aggregating the proceedings somehow. But the 10% rule would solve the principal problems Kaus points to, i.e., the return of a spoils system of political patronage and the loss of institutional memory from excessive turnover. Some corporations have adopted plans to evaluate employee performance and regularly weed out the bottom 10 or 15%, and this plan would have a similar effect on productivity and morale by discouraging people from being perceived as being the bottom of the barrel.

Read today's Lileks, which has an intriguing discourse on storming the beaches at Normandy in a computer game -- "this really happened, and no one got a second chance. Some didn’t even get a first one" -- Lileks sets the point up well enough to make you think, without really connecting all the dots on this one. Then, he does an abbreviated version of the Full Lileks on Tom Daschle; as usual the whole thing is worth reading, but the conclusion is lethal:

"It’s telling that Daschle finally showed “passion” when he felt the Senate was being attacked. . . .Zell [Miller] made a speech as equally impassioned as Daschle, but the subject was the injuries of the nation, not the tender sensibilities of the Senate. I was walking Jasper when he ran down the litany of horrors that might make people look back and wonder why the Senate dragged its heels. 'Will it take a smallpox outbreak that wipes out the twin cites of Minneapolis and St. Paul?' he asked.

For a moment I had a vision of queuing at the clinic, Gnat in my arms, waiting for the prick and the hiss, wondering if we’d be among the ones who reacted badly to the vaccine, wondering if the disease would spread to Mexico, and how many there would die, and how many more would pour north in search of a shot.

Two Democrats, two views. Senator Miller’s comments focussed my mind the nation, on a future I’d like to avoid.

Senator Daschle’s comments focussed my mind on Senator Daschle."

This NY Times story is awfully tendentious. The headline "Daschle Denounces Bush Remarks on Iraq as Partisan" implies that Daschle's complaints are about Bush's comments on Iraq. Contrast CNN:

"But Bush's comments of late about Senate Democrats and national security have come in the context of the fight over legislation for the proposed Department of Homeland Security . The Bush comment about the Senate not being "interested" in national security came at a campaign event Monday in New Jersey when the president was talking about the legislation -- not Iraq."

The egregious bias in the Times piece is to toss in the Bob Dole remark about 'Democrat wars,' which is only relevant if you are trying to say that Republicans and only Republicans politicize war. The Democrats would never do that - never, oh, say, run a TV commercial with a mushroom cloud to suggest that the GOP Presidential nominee would drag us into nuclear war.

I'm just in a war & politics mood today . . .

Howard Kurtz has a great column today with all sorts of fun tidbits, including Tom Harkin's Watergate, which is welcome news in the tight Senate balance. I loved this quote:

"U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa apologized yesterday for his campaign's role in passing along a transcript of a secretly taped meeting involving his election opponent. The aide who released the transcript acted independently, without the approval of Harkin or his campaign manager, the senator said. "'I make no excuses,' Harkin said in an interview with The Des Moines Register. 'I am the captain of the ship, and I take responsibility, and I apologize for it. These things shouldn't happen like that.'"

Yup, no excuses, except he acted alone, he didn't tell us, it was a junior staffer, . . .

Dick Armey is reported to have said that Jews who are liberals are dumb. Pressed for clarification, he now says he thinks all liberals are dumb. Armey has always had an awfully big mouth, which is one of his assets, but can also be quite a pain.

Somebody forgot to upgrade Al Gore's program; he's still running Anti-War 3.0, the August 2002 version, when most of the Democrats have moved on to limiting the President's mandate and then quickly changing the subject. Both Gore and (you guessed it) Jimmy Carter are still spitting out cliches that no serious person could value. Gore does nicely encapsulate the theory of the "only with the UN" crowd, when he "accused Bush of abandoning the goal of a world where nations follow laws. 'That concept would be displaced by the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the president of the United States,' he said. 'If other nations assert the same right, then the rule of law will quickly be replaced by the reign of fear,' and any nation that perceives itself threatened would feel justified in starting wars, he said."

Of course, the rule of law is also undermined when people who break the law suffer no consequences, as would happen here with Saddam. In that sense, Gore fits neatly in David Brooks' box: he's so caught up with Bush that he has nothing to say about Saddam after having argued in campaign 2000 that he would push for Saddam's overthrow (hey, wouldn't that violate the law?) But the failure to enforce international law runs to a deeper failing: the all-too-common Left/liberal view that having laws is the important thing, as opposed to enforcing them. Thus, one can push for more complex and all-consuming campaign finance laws but then complain that there is "no controlling legal authority" when caught violating one of them, and hey, everybody does it! (We won't even get into sexual harrassment law, but you remember that one too).

There's a legitimate argument here that some of Bush's preemption principles would shatter the already tissue-thin fabric of international institutions, but as the President has amply demonstrated, this specific case is one where those institutions are under an even greater threat from inaction than action. Any serious person in the governments of reluctant allies like Germany or Saudi Arabia surely, privately, knows this. Perhaps Al Gore does too. If so, shame on him.

I always thought that Gore was a more serious threat to democracy than Clinton, because Gore at least seemed to be an honest man who adopted lying as a deliberate and cynical strategy, premised upon a contempt for the intelligence and attention spans of the voters, in the belief that it had been proven successful, whereas Clinton may well be so steeped in his own deceptions that he really can't see that what he's doing is wrong. Here we have another example: Anti-War Gore is no more convincing than Semi-Hawk Al was during the Cold War, or Last Minute Convert To The War Gore was in 1991. They all smell like carefully calibrated examples of opportunism. Except this time, the stakes of opportunism are unacceptably high.

Bob Novak's Saturday column has some nuggets: The Republicans could gain a critical Senate seat in South Dakota by making the war on Iraq a campaign issue; among the fights on homeland security, "[u]nions are insisting on strict seniority, without regard to language capability, for Customs personnel sent abroad for pre-screening"; highly-regarded Tennessee Senator Dr. Bill Frist is contemplating retirement in 2006.

People complain about the timing and completeness of corporate disclosures in the U.S., but check out this doozy: Germany's peacenik Social Democrat prime minister Gerhard Schroeder finishes in essentially a tie with his opponent, each garnering 38.5% of the vote (remember this when some Euro-snob pundit gripes about Bush not having an electoral mandate), and Schroder wins the tiebreaker because another team in his division (the Greens) won more games in the NFC . . . anyway, notice this item buried at the end of UPI's report:

"Even more challenging than repairing the rift with Washington is the looming crisis with Germany's partners in the euro, Europe's new single currency. Germany delayed publishing its budget deficit figures until after the election, fearing it would breach the maximum level allowed under the rules of the eurozone's Stability Pact. If budget deficits exceed 3 percent of gross domestic product, an offending country faces fines of up to 0.5 percent of GDP. In Germany's case, that means fines of up to $10 billion.

The German economy is heading back into recession, and the higher spending on paying for more and more unemployed. Combined with lower tax revenues, this spending means the Stability Pact is almost certain to be breached. And even though France is also seeking some relaxation from the pact's tight rules, other members of the euro currency have said they refuse to change it, fearing a loss of credibility in world currency markets."

(Emphasis added). In other words -- leaving aside the fact that the EU apparently operates under something very similar to Major League Baseball's collective bargaining agreement ("Ach, General von Schroedergrabber, you spent too much on your bureaucrats, we must fine you for breaching the luxury tax!") -- the German ruling party has been hiding the government's finances to pull the wool over the world's currency markets, at least until after the election. Say what you will about American politics, even Gray Davis couldn't pull off something like this.

How low has the California governor's race sunk? While Mickey Kaus has been beating the drum on speculation that Ah-nold will jump in the race as a write-in at the last possible minute (maybe late October), the American Prowler says Gray Davis is worried about the Green candidate.

This Reuters story doesn't quite live up to its headline, "German Ex-Communists Lure Votes with Sex and Drugs." More like a case of how Communists are still in the false advertising business. But doesn't it speak volumes about German humor when the Social Democrats' satirical website is called "www.nichtregierungsfaehig.de?" I mean, I guess in German that's catchy and memorable . . .

Michelle Malkin says Hillary should have kept her nose out of this woman's clitoris.

Dave Barry is back to one of his favorite targets, the War on Tobacco:

"[L]et's review how the War On Tobacco works. The underlying principle, of course, is: Tobacco Is Bad. It kills many people, and it causes many others to smell like ashtrays in a poorly janitored bus station.

So a while ago, politicians from a bunch of states were scratching their heads, trying to figure out what to do about the tobacco problem. One option, of course, was to say: ''Hey, if people want to be stupid, it's none of our business.'' But of course that was out of the question. Politicians believe EVERYTHING is their business, which is why -- to pick one of many examples -- most states have elaborate regulations governing who may, and who may not, give manicures.

Another option was to simply make selling cigarettes illegal, just like other evil activities, such as selling heroin, or giving unlicensed manicures, or operating lotteries (except, of course, for lotteries operated by states). But the politicians immediately saw a major flaw with this approach: It did not provide any way for money to be funneled to politicians.

And so they went with option three, which was to file lawsuits against the tobacco companies. The underlying moral principle of these lawsuits was: ``You are knowingly selling a product that kills tens of thousands of our citizens each year. We want a piece of that action!''"

Mitt Romney, running for Massachusetts governor, is in a strange position: he's fighting in his own party primary to get his pick of running mates against an extremely well-financed challenger who has won the GOP nomination for statewide office once before (both Ronmey and Rapaport have run unsuccessful campaigns for the Senate). Here's one columnist arguing that Romney will be better off if his choice loses.

A column on Tech Central Station says the pro-life movement's latest grasp at scientific support, a study purporting to show a link between women having abortions and suffering death from various causes (homicide, suicide) within the following year has too many holes to prove much. The point is well-taken, but two caveats here: (1) like most findings favorable to the pro-life movement, this one was barely reported in the mainstream press, so it didn't do the kind of damage we see from left-wing junk science, which often results in blaring headlines, new government regulations, and waves of litigation driving substantial companies into bankruptcy; and (2) the author doesn't show that the study is wrong, just that it's inconclusive. Further inquiry may be required, which is basically the conclusion of most stories about science anyway (in fact, that could be a good motto for science generally).

Gerhard Schroeder is looking to buy votes with taxpayer money. His opponents have decided to make the welfare state's support for immigrant religious fanatics an issue. But the Swedes are sticking to their beloved welfare state.

CNN describes conservative critics of Bill O'Reilly as "the same ideologues who helped make the Fox News Channel personality one of the most popular figures on cable television." Would Donahue's fan be described the same way? And Kausfiles catches the NY Times calling Pete Domenici, practically the paradigm of the Old Bull Republican who's often at odds with party conservatives, a "hard line conservative." Kaus shoots back by calling the NYT editors "blindered Upper West Side rube[s]."

The indispensable Bob Novak reports that Missouri Republicans are plotting some legal hijinks as payback for the shenanigans that got Jean Carhanan into the Senate and John Ashcroft into the Justice Department, and the result could make Trent Lott the majority leader again before Christmas and force a flurry of votes on judicial nominees:

"If Republican Jim Talent defeats appointive Democratic Sen. Jean Carnahan Nov. 5 in Missouri, the GOP is determined to seat him immediately -- restoring a Republican majority for a post-election "lame duck" session. Present polls show former Rep. Talent has overtaken Carnahan, the widow of the late Gov. Mel Carnahan who posthumously defeated Sen. John Ashcroft in 2000. Secretary of State Matt Blunt (son of House Chief Deputy Whip Roy Blunt) would immediately certify Talent as U.S. senator. It is considered unlikely that Democratic Gov. Bob Holden, who narrowly defeated Talent for the governorship in 2000, would block the certification from reaching Washington. That would produce a bitter Senate confrontation, particularly if Democrats retain Senate control for the regular session beginning in 2003. A lame duck session is probable because Congress will not approve funding for the government before the election."

Novak's last item also shows why New York's splintered multi-party ballots are so malleable as to be susceptible to all sorts of tricks.

An Instapundit reader has a great Noam Chomsky joke.

That was the Election-Day headline that sank Senator Bedfellow in the comic strip Bloom County. Will the jury verdit in favor of a convicted drug trafficker who sued Bill Simon's investment firm -- a verdict that's now been reversed after Gray Davis used it to paint Simon as a crook? Unlike Senator Bedfellow, Simon now has two months to set the record straight, although doing so keeps him on the defensive and perpetuates Davis' campaign to run from his own record. I'd still like to know more about this case, which, just from press accounts, sounds like a run-of-the-mill second-guessing-an-investment-gone-bad suit that, if anything, highlights the need for tort reform in plaintiff-friendly California.

Alberto Gonzales calls Chuck Schumer a liar. Not a good way for a Supreme Court hopeful to ingratiate himself with a prominent member of the majority on the Judiciary Committee.

Janet Reno "has refused to concede" . . . this story just cracks me up.

The Hall of Fame's admission standards are really dropping, aren't they? OK, forget that stuff about moving on.

Speaking of the Clintons, Eugene Volokh and Instapundit have blown the whistle on what really should be a big story: Viacom's doctoring of the tapes of the September 11 tribute concert last fall to make it appear that my state's junior Senator was cheered rather than jeered by the families of the cops and firemen.

I picked up this story about Florida's continuing voter woes from The Corner - of course, something like this would never have happened when Janet Reno was Attorney General.

Speaking of TAP's political content, this analysis of Cynthia McKinney's loss is typical TAP stuff -- lots of innuendo and a reluctant conclusion that maybe things are as they seem after all -- but what dismays me is the tendency, in discussions of politics in the African-American community (I don't know if this is driven by the media, the grass roots, or just the people disaffected enough to talk to the papers) to look solely at who a candidate's friends are and a few bellwether issues, and not have any kind of debate about ideas and their consequences.

FEDERALISM is often thought of -- principally by its critics on the Left, but by some fairly zealous conservatives as well -- as synonymous with "States' Rights" as against a powerful federal government. That's a big part of the picture, of course, but it's not the whole story. There's also what I call "Federalism's Edge" - the right of the states to be free of overweening influence by other state governments that seek to impose their public policies on the rest of the nation. After all, a distant and intrusive setter of national policy is no less obnoxious if it's set in Montgomery' Alabama than inside the Beltway. More so, since at least there are SOME mechanisms for controlling Washington.

Federalism's Edge, as much as States' Rights, has been one of the hottest issues of the past decade or so. Whatever you think of the merits, can one state cram gay marriage down the throats of the country? Can one state's Supreme Court decide who gets to be President of the rest of us? Can one or a handful of State Attorneys General, or juries in a few tiny jurisdictions, prescribe codes of conduct for nationwide businesses?

Liberals have long bemoaned what they see as the opposite problem, the "race to the bottom" where states compete to LOWER regulatory burdens, although at least there there's market forces at work rather than ironclad mandates. This is where Jonathan Chait's assault on Delaware, after the fashion of Jonah Goldberg's French-bashing columns, comes in. Personally, from my experience as a business and securities litigator, I think Chait doesn't know much about Delaware's court system if he thinks it's apt to be lax in imposing liability on corporations and their management. But there's an interesting point here: is it inconsistent with Our Federalism for one state to create conditions for what is effectively a national corporate governance regime? And does it say something that corporations seem to WANT the efficiency and stability provided by such a regime?

PART II of this comment to follow later.

Another blog link - check out this item on OxBlog, noticing that even the NAACP is sick of racialist politics when it comes to races between two African-American candidates.

This priceless item supports OpinionJournal's James Taranto's theory that groups like PETA are actually run by Right-Wing double agents obsessed with getting the worst possible press for their causes. To me, it's just a desperate cry for help. But I can also imagine the bottomless mirth generated for a crowd of your typical brat-and-brew Wisconsin sports fans of watching the "Soysage" get repeatedly pummelled by the, er, meatier sausages like something from the chariot race in Ben-Hur.

WARD CONNERLY'S RACIAL PRIVACY INITIATIVE, which would ban the government from collecting data on race/ethnicity or labelling people by their race/ethnicity, is set (if I have my facts straight) to face the California voters this fall. Is it just me, or does it appear that this piece , by a friend of former Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell, is supportive of the goals of the Racial Privacy Initiative (to wit, getting people to stop identifying themselves and others by color), while this piece by National Review Online culture warrior Stanley Kurtz can be read as an eloquent attack on Connerly's initiative as disarming conservatives of one of the few weapons they have for exposing discrimination?

UPDATE: The Racial Privacy Initiative won't be on the ballot until March 2004. Lesson: I don't understand California politics.

Great quote from today's George Will column: ``Why do people take an instant dislike to Sen. Robert Torricelli? To save time.''

Howard Fineman discovers the shocking truth: candidates have trouble winning elections based on the family name - if the candidate himself stinks and he's running in a state that ran Dad out of town on a rail! (Of course, the rule may not matter if it's a Kennedy in New England). But then again, politics is still full of family connections, from Elizabeth Dole to Dick Armey's son, just as baseball is full of players using an unfair genetic advantage. Cuomo's whining speech about presenting "too many issues" essentially blamed the electorate for being too dumb to understand him, but there's a point there: a successful candidate has to meet Winston Churchill's famous definition of a fanatic: someone who won't change his mind and won't change the subject.

Tech Central Station blows the whistle on the worst kind of racial stereotyping by a liberal think tank.

Maybe it was Papa Mario, maybe it was our distinguished 42nd President, and maybe it was Uncle Ted, but somebody must have sat down with Andrew Cuomo and told him not to be Freddy Ferrer or Liz Holtzman. I'm no fan of Cuomo, but good for him.

I only just recently picked up on this character assassination piece against a Bush appointee to the Department of Agriculture by Will Saletan on Slate. It sounds like there may be no smoking gun legally, but without hearing the other side, Saletan has a pretty good case that this guy shouldn't be trusted to combat the endemic corruption at Ag. Of course, as Saletan rightly notes, that endemic corruption not only isn't illegal, it's virtually the entire point of the Agriculture Department. Yet another example of how Bush is soft on corporate welfare, big spending, and their friends in Congress (i.e., probably about 90-95% of all Members of both Houses).

Debra Saunders has an intriguing suggestion for California Republicans frustrated by their inability to dump Gray Davis: elect a Republican lieutenant governor who can do things like appoint judges whenever Davis leaves the state. Of course, her argument is largely premised upon Davis' White House ambitions, which you have to figure are temporarily in the trash can (I'm betting he waits until 2008 - even Davis has to know his stock is low now and he's too late starting for 2004).

This link tells the story, the details of which have begun to fade from memory, of Jimmy Carter's epic battle with a ferocious swimming bunny rabbit ("Look at the bones, man!"). Unfortunately, the picture in the story doesn't seem to load on my computer.

Following up on the thoughts in my Bruce post of yesterday, I ran accross this article on Slate arguing that the Left has grown boring and dour while the Right has all the fun. Of course, the author works from a piece that picks on The Nation - which was never exactly National Lampoon to begin with, given the difficulty of finding Stalinists with a good sense of humor - and compares it to The Weekly Standard, which isn't even the most entertaining of right-wing screeds, not even close. Jack Shafer notes hypersensitivity as a leading cause of this humor impairment, but the fact is that postmodern, oppression-is-everywhere dogma and sackcloth-and-ashes environmentalism are the real culprits. The Left lives in terror of optimism; heck, the entire liberal establishment rests on the idea that the civil rights movement is proof positive that some things, only the federal government can accomplish - yet that same establishment would die rather than admit that any progress has been made on race relations since 1955, since that would prove that maybe the dark, sinister powerful forces don't impose their false consciousness on everybody after all.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have a different form of dishonesty that the Left didn't create but commonly uses to its advantage: inauthentic emotional one-upmanship. The incomparable Mark Steyn has the goods on this one in his plea to separate the genuine grief and righteous anger of September 11th from the phony, it's-so-sad sap that surrounded the death of Princess Di. While I may rail, as I did below, against people who rip Bruce Springsteen for his emotionalism, there's a world of difference between Bruce's heartfelt emotion and, say, a croon from some boy band over lyrics some staff composer churned out for them, and it's the same thing here. We can feel our own pain. Sometimes, pretending to feel someone else's is just bunk.

Instapundit linked earlier to this fine Michael Barone analysis of why Cynthia Mckinney lost and how it was different from the race that brought down Bob Barr. The interesting thing was his speculation at the end:

"The only possible bad news here is that McKinney has said she may run for the Senate in 2004. The seat that is up is currently held by Zell Miller, who never really wanted to be a senator anyway (he was appointed to fill the vacancy caused by the unexpected death of Republican Paul Coverdell) and who turns 72 in 2004; he is widely expected to retire. Miller would obviously clobber McKinney in a primary, but she could conceivably finish first in a multicandidate primary. She would lose the runoff, of course."

I suppose she would, but if the Georgia GOP would have one heckuva golden opportunity if she didn't. Note Barone's calculation that McKinney, even running against an African-American liberal Democrat, drew just 5% of the white vote in the primary. With those odds, nearly anyone's a good bet to beat her. Know any ambitious, young, retired Georgia Republicans who might be itching for a new challenge by 2004? And boy, wouldn't that be an entertaining campaign.

Here's a bizarre story from the American Prospect about Citizens Opposed to Racism and Discrimination (CORAD), a conservative group in Minnesota that's running ads against Paul Wellstone and put out a rap CD (!) full of what can only be described as right-wing propaganda in an effort to break the Democrats' hammerlock on African-American voters in the Twin Cities. TAP's problem is that it can't seem to decide whether or not CORAD is actually accomplishing enough to be newsworthy.

From an email I sent to some friends in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore decision:

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From an email I sent to friends on November 20, 2000:

The Democratic Party now says all pregnant chads must be delivered; all chad pregnancies must be carried to term. I say every chad must be a wanted chad. If a voter has exercised his or her right to control when and whether to deliver the chad, the states should have no authority to force them to be delivered. It is fundamental to the scheme of ordered liberty that the right to decisions made in the privacy of the voting booth stay there. Liberty finds no refuge in a recount of doubt.

You know, I tend to vote primarily on ideology and party lines. But a lot of voters out there are not so inclined, and tend to ask the question, what are you going to do for me? Politicians spend a lot of time honing their message for particular interest groups, tailoring their strategy for winning them over.

What hit me the other day (maybe this is a sign of too much time in the car) was this: Al Gore does not even want my vote. Think about it broadly: white male voters between the ages of 21 and 60 who work in white-collar private-sector jobs and/or earn at least $40,000 or $50,000 per year (or earn susbstantial taxable capital gains) make up, I suspect, a decent-sized chunk of the electorate. There must be at least as many of us as there are so-called "soccer moms," or unionized blue-collar workers, and the group probably compares somewhat favorably in size to black voters, or college students who vote, or even to elderly voters who take prescription medication. Or maybe I have my numbers wrong, but there must be enough to at least make a dent in a close election.

But what is Al Gore offering us? All his tax breaks, his "Social Security plus" plan, virtually all his economic incentives cap out somewhere around $50,000 per year. He wants to pour huge dollars into schools, but how does that help people like me who want their children raised in schools that are permitted to teach faith and moral virtues? And not only is he neither reaching into the goodie bag for us nor offering to lighten the load of government, but he doesn't talk to us, doesn't speak our language, doesn't even have any apparent strategy to win our votes. When Gore talks about economic growth, he puts on the green eyeshade and talks about balancing the budget, about deficits and debts and surpluses and government "investment." He always zeroes in on government, never talks about lifting regulatory or tax burdens, about the virtues of private investment and private business, about getting out of the way. When Gore talks about individuals, when does he ever mention people like us?

(As a practical matter, Gore isn't offering much to nonwhite male voters in these categories either, but at least he claims to feel their pain).

Bush, of course, does -- he wants to cut my taxes, he wants to help me save for retirement, and he regularly addresses issues of concern to middle- and upper-income voters, the people who pay most of the taxes and work to pay the bills. And when you look at the polls, that's why white male voters as a whole -- including the blue-collar voters that Gore is at least trying to win over -- are flocking to Bush at something like a 2-to-1 margin. How on earth can you overcome a gap like that and be president? How can a candidate win public office by winning only a third of the very demographic group of which he himself (and most of his publicly mentioned likely running mates) are members? And why wouldn't you even try?

Well, of course, Bush had my vote anyway; obviously I believe that Bush's plans are better for the public weal as a whole than Gore's, and while I would like a tax cut I don't necessarily need one. I tend to focus more on what Bush can do systemically for issues like education and Social Security and Medicare. But when you look at this on a purely selfish level, it's hard to see why anyone in our position would give their vote to Gore. Hey, he isn't even asking.

This is an email I sent to friends on August 1, 2000.

This is an email I wrote to some friends on February 14, 2000. Some of it now looks embarrassing in retrospect - particularly how little I was thinking about foreign policy and judicial nominees at the time, and the fact that I failed to foresee McCain's veer to the left. Other predictions, particularly with regard to the Democrats' behavior after 2000 and the guilt-by-association problem with Bush's financial supporters, hold up fairly well.

Here is why, as a conservative Republican, I support McCain for president (in no particular order; I won't bother discussing the broader policy questions of why I would vote for McCain over Gore, since I would not expect to presuade anyone on that kind of score). I address two topics: why McCain has a better chance of beating Gore in the fall, and why he is better suited to the presidency than Bush.

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. . . as Paul Tsongas used to call it, actually meant something this year. I'm actually thinking of donating a little money to McCain -- I'm still not sure who to vote for (I haven't heard enough from him on the three most important domestic issues, education reform, Social Security reform and selection of federal judges) but I'd hate to see his campaign peter out for lack of funds (though it would be ironic). A fight to somewhere close to the finish (which can only happen if there's a split decision on March 7) would, I think, be good for the party, particularly since Bush (if he wins) has enough cash on hand to keep the machine rolling (unlike Dole in 1996, who was forced into a quiet period after the primaries while Clinton and his media allies filleted him on tobacco and abortion). The bad primary fights are the ones you get when one candidate has no chance, like Forbes or Buchanan. Bradley may be like that, hammering Gore on integrity and ethics rather than engaging an accross-the-board issues debate. But Bush and McCain both need to keep one eye on November, and both fancy themselves civil-minded moderates, so there's only so bad it will get.

I don't think Bush will actually move to the right on any issues, as the pundits warn -- he'll just have to learn better how to sell the conservative agenda. If he can't do that he can't win anyway. He actually is a real conservative already -- "compassionate conservative" is BS, I've always thought he should call it "smiley face conservative," because it's about explaining the existing agenda's virtues (i.e., why conservative policies are a better deal for the middle class and the poor) through a nonthreatening candidate, rather than actually changing policy (which is fine with me).

Gore-Bradley, by contrast, is still highly unlikely to be a real race, but it could be a long ugly fight like Dole-Forbes in 1996 and Clinton-Brown in 1992. Bradley has a lot of cash and he's showing signs of being bitter enough at the direction of his party to stay and fight long after Gore has effectively clinched. Having Gore constantly taunting him for being a quitter can't help the case of people who want him to bail out early for the sake of party unity. Gore has already moved left but I don't think he'll really move any further -- but he could take some punishment by the unprecedented spectacle of a fellow Democrat breaking the code of silence on the ethics of Clintonism.

The real message of New Hampshire, as I see it, is that the strong showing of McCain and Gore and the late revival by Bradley proves one thing: the voters are NOT tired of negative campaigning or of strongly and specifically worded appeals to integrity and combat. Bush's just-the-agenda, forget-the-last-8-years strategy captured the popular imagination in the summer of 1999 because people were sick to death of arguing about impeachment, but a year later the voters are looking for someone to explain how we reached that nadir in the first place and how to avoid a repeat, not of the acrimony, but of the scandal itself. The Clintonites argued that the only really bad thing was GOP insistence on "divisiveness," on casting judgment (this is the type of logic that says high crime statistics mean cops are arresting too many people). Contrary to what they would have you believe, I think that once people moved past the don't-rock-the-boat stage of opposing impeachment during a market boom they began to recognize that this was not a morally neutral argument -- that there is some virtue in alarming people when their government has grown corrupt and its leaders too accustomed to the habits of deceit. To voters concerned about such issues, Bush's conscientious objector status on the ethical issues comes accross as unduly timid. McCain roared ahead in the polls late in large part, I think, because he promised GOP conservatives that he would go after Al Gore on Gore's dubious honesty (don't forget that McCain voted to remove the president from office), while Bush increasingly looked vulnerable to the kind of one-sided smear campaigning that is being used against Bradley. Bringing out dad -- who never did learn to fight back against Bill Clinton -- only underlined that.

This is an email I sent to friends on February 2, 2000.

This is an email I sent to friends on December 15, 1998

Be it Resolved: If (Big If) the President is impeached and removed from office, Republicans will suffer no adverse political consequences (other than installing a left-wing zealot in the White House in place of the spineless spouse of a left-wing zealot). Why, you ask? Here's why. Just think -- what, literally, is Bill Clinton's theme song? "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow . . . yesterday's gone." Clinton has survived his many scandals and at least as many flip-flops and broken promises by accusing his opponents of living in the past, of dwelling on old grudges rather than looking to the Bridge To The Twenty-First Century, of being the party of scandal rather than the Man From Hope. What he said yesterday is old news, and it's nothing but mudslinging to compare it to what he is saying today. Live for the moment! Feel your pain! Ideas have a past and a future, but feelings are fleeting, and Bill Clinton operates strictly on feelings. Clinton is truly Orwellian in his commitment to erasing the inconvenient past, always remaining the ahistorical man. In many ways the American public has expressed an unwillingness to face impeachment and removal because the people are driven by fear of the future -- concern that the economy is doing just fine and who wants to upset the applecart? And Clinton has few real friends in politics, only people who ally with him out of expediency, as he does with them (think how he abandons allies in trouble so often, leaving them to their own devices. Where was he, anyway, for Mike Espy? Henry Cisneros, who's being prosecuted for lies about an extramarital affair? Not to mention his personal associates. He was certainly ready to hang Lewinsky out to dry before she opened her laundry basket). Most of his supposedly loyal aids have left the White House; he has not inspired a committed core of true believers because, after all, what would they then believe in? Clinton's power and popularity thus derive entirely from three things: his grip on power, fear of change, and his appeals to the emotions of the moment. If he leaves office, all these will be gone. Like the leaders of totalitarian mass movements, once he loses both power and the bully pulpit he needs to keep rewriting history in his favor, his following will evaporate, leaving no trace. Why fear impeachment and removal when they are ancient history? What Democratic congressional candidate will want to run ads about Monica Lewinsky two years from now? Who will want to hear it? People will care about whether they want Bush or Gore in the White House, not whether they liked that Clinton fella when he was in office. He's old news.